In WSU Vancouver’s Micro-Nano-Biosystems Lab, Jong-Hoon Kim and his students are developing tiny devices, such as a “smart pacifier” that could improve health care.
WSU Vancouver’s Micro-Nano-Biosystems Lab is a busy hub for research related to health and medicine. Although any advances in the practice of health care are years away, the lab is investigating, among other things, the use of wireless devices to help disabled people use computers with eye movements, and the use of electric fields to manipulate biomolecules, such as bacteria and viruses.
This past summer, the lab published the first of its research projects to reach proof-of-concept stage: a “smart pacifier” that can help monitor electrolyte levels in a newborn’s saliva. The smart pacifier would be a big step forward from current practice used to monitor electrolytes in Neonatal Intensive Care Units: invasive, twice-daily blood draws, which can be painful.
As Forbes magazine explained, “Electrolytes such as sodium, potassium, bicarbonate, magnesium and calcium are crucial aspects of human physiology; even minute changes can disrupt metabolic balance and homeostasis. These levels can be routinely and easily monitored by running blood tests. However, a noninvasive way to ascertain these levels is novel.”
For Jong-Hoon Kim, who heads the lab at WSU Vancouver, developing the smart pacifier was personal. Kim is an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and engineering and computer science.
“My first boy had very bad jaundice when he was born and had to stay in the hospital for about a week,” Kim said. “They drew blood and were poking a few times a day. It’s tough to see these procedures.” That boy, Jamie, is now 11 years old. Kim and his wife, Jahae, also have a 7-year-old son, Joshua.
The pacifier can alert caregivers wirelessly if electrolyte levels are abnormal or if babies are dehydrated. The design is based on a commercially available pacifier, with microfluidic channels carrying the saliva.
“We know that premature babies have a better chance of survival if they get a high quality of care in the first month of birth,” Kim said. “Normally, in a hospital environment, they draw blood from the baby twice a day, so they just get two data points. This device is a noninvasive way to provide continuous and real-time monitoring of the electrolyte concentration of babies.”
Kim and his team will continue working on the pacifier to make the components more affordable and recyclable. “We hope to see this in the market,” Kim said, “but it will take time.”
The pacifier study was published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics. Collaborators were research scientists from Georgia Institute of Technology, Pukyong National University and Yonsei University College of Medicine in South Korea.
Other projects
The Micro-Nano-Biosystems Lab has other health-monitoring projects in the pipeline. For example, researchers are working on a wireless heart rate monitor as an improvement over today’s electrocardiogram, another wireless device that will use eye movements to control computers or other devices, improved microfluidic processes and a soft composite material for wearable bioelectronics.
A recent article related to the pandemic, “Highly Sensitive Immunoresistive Sensor for Point-of-Care Screening for COVID-19,” was published in Biosensor in February as part of a special issue on portable biosensors and bioelectronics for advancing health care. The study, which described a highly sensitive, rapid and inexpensive device to screen for COVID-19, involved collaboration with several researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle, where Kim earned his Ph.D.
He described his research as “mostly focused on the development of sensors or devices based on micro-nano structures for biomedical application. I manufacture small structures and try to use them to detect biomolecules or to separate some of the particles out, and then study how they interact.”
Kim said he has not yet been working with WSU’s Elson S. Floyd School of Medicine but is keeping in touch with them.
Kim started the lab after joining WSU Vancouver in 2014. Students in the lab work with such companies as Analog Devices in Camas, Intel and ASML Holdings. The research has been funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation and WSU.
“I think WSU Vancouver has a really good research environment,” Kim said. “There are a lot of semiconductor companies working on micro-nano technology, so I can establish a good relationship with them. And with the small size of the school and our clean facility, we can have more interaction with both graduate and undergraduate students.”
Kim earned his bachelor’s degree in South Korea and worked for a semiconductor company there, then became interested in biomedical research in San Diego and moved on to the University of California, San Diego, for his master’s degree and the University of Washington for his Ph.D.
A job announcement on the Micro-Nano-Biosystems Lab’s website noted that they were seeking an experimentalist. Kim puts himself in that camp. “Most of my research is experimentation,” he said. “I collaborate with a lot of computation people, and I am looking for students who seek and enjoy hands-on experiences.”
As for the future, “Hopefully I can make a better impact on the biomedical field and society,” Kim said. “I want to work on my devices and hope to make people’s lives better.”