Abstract
The ability to maintain a healthy body weight has become an increasingly common roadblock in modern
medicine as extreme high or low weight can lead to and aggravate existing medical conditions. Achieving a
healthy weight is often difficult for those who are overweight, obese or underweight since a great deal of food
intake and exercise tracking is usually a requirement for effective weight targets. The accuracy and
effectiveness of this process could be increased drastically if a real-time fat oxidation biomarker monitoring
device were available. Recent clinical studies of fat oxidation by the team and others have demonstrated the
importance of ketones as biomarkers with a great opportunity for those patients who need proactively concrete
weight management interventions. In addition to eating disorders, conditions related to ketoacidosis, which is a
well-known risk state for type 1 diabetes, or ketosis state, a high ketone level state induced by low carb / high
fat diets used to manage several diseases (such as epilepsy, type 2 diabetes, cancer among many others) are
in need of close ketone monitoring.
Although ketones are FDA approved fat oxidation biomarkers, there are relatively few ketone-based
sensors available for consumer use. Those that do exist are based on blood, urine and breath test and are
one-point-in-time use, sometime inaccurate, or far too invasive for everyday use. As a result, a huge need
exists for the development of a passive and non-invasive ketone sensor. One possible solution is to develop a
sensor that displays real time data regarding the wearer’s fat oxidation by tracking the acetone permeated
through the skin of the sensor’s wearer.
Researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) have developed a sensor technology for passive
detection of acetone that has shown accurately monitoring acetone. However, extensive work is necessary
to complete the sensor optimization to sense skin acetone, and integrate the sensor into a wearable. The team
of researchers at ASU will work on the necessary tasks to create a prototype for testing in a pilot study. A
medical science expert team at University of Arizona (UA) will work together with the sensor team to develop
the first prototype. The sensor group at ASU will develop, optimize, build and test the wearable sensor
analyzer. Meanwhile, the clinical experts at UA and industry partners at 3M Company will assure industry
quality standards requirements, and provide feedback in the device and its user interface. The analyzer brings
an unprecedented opportunity for weight and multiple disease management, since not only overcomes current
barriers from existing ketone sensors, but also eliminates the patient’s burden of current approaches, which
require personal tracking of weight, food intake and activity, while providing timely intervention feedback.