Recent advances in ingestible sensors have enabled in situ detection of gastrointestinal (GI) biomarkers which shows great potential in shifting the paradigm of diagnosing GI and systemic diseases. However, the humid, acidic gastric environment is extremely harsh to electrically powered sensors, which limits their capacity for long term, continuous monitoring. Here, we propose an encapsulation approach for a gas sensor integrated into a nasogastric (NG) tube that overcomes chemical corrosion, electrical short, and mechanical collision in a gastric environment to enable continuous gaseous biomarkers monitoring. The coating effects on the sensitivity, signal latency, and repeatability are investigated. Our long-term continuous monitoring in vitro results show that the proposed coating method enables the gas sensors to function reliably and consistently in the simulated GI environment for more than 1 week. The encapsulation is composed of Polycaprolactone (PCL) to protect against mechanical scratching and Parylene C to prevent a sensor from chemical corrosion and electrical short. The average life-time of the sensor with 10 micrometers Parylene coating is about 3.6 days. Increasing the coating thickness to 20 micrometers results in 10.0 days. In terms of repeatability, 10 micrometers and 20 micrometers Parylene C coated sensors have a standard deviation of 1.30% and 2.10% for its within sensor response, and 5.19% and 3.06% between sensors respectively.
Keywords: continuous biomarkers monitoring; encapsulation; gas sensor; gastrointestinal tract.