Smart hydrogels are a versatile class of materials that are attractive for biomedical sensor applications due to their potential biocompatibility and stimuli-responsiveness. However, the integration of these hydrogels into sensors requires development and engineering efforts on optimizing the volume phase transition and time response for the respective sensing applications. This work presents an optical evaluation platform for investigating hydrogel swelling properties in a liquid environment with automated flow control. It employs hydrogel features integrated in microfluidic test strips which are easily interchangeable. The evaluation is performed using an image sensor that records multiple miniaturized hydrogels in parallel. The overall performance is demonstrated for various hydrogel compositions and four different environmental stimuli including glucose concentration changes in serum and blood, which potentially enables pathways for this sensing platform to be used for point-of-care applications.
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Borooman et al. (2024) studied this question.
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