I-Corps: Remote Blood Analysis for Digital Animal Health

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of an implantable sensor and measurement system to monitor the health of feed animals digitally. The proposed implantable sensor platform measures a wide range of health biomarkers such as temperature, oxygen, glucose, pregnancy hormones, and lactate without the expensive of drawing blood or other bodily fluids. Morbidity and mortality rates of animals in feedlots range between 15% - 45% with Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) alone having an economic burden of $1 billion. In addition, the proposed technology has the potential to lower the use of antibiotics and medications used with feed animals by predicting illness days before conventional methods. The system uses a low-cost passive sensor implant that offers a significantly lower cost solution than alternative active electronic wearable devices. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a luminescent hydrogel implant that is the size of a grain of rice and an instrumentation system for data collection that is able to “read” the implant. The biosensor is implanted under the animal’s hide just a few millimeters below the tissue surface. The implant device is seeded with a molecule that lights up when attached to a target biomarker such as oxygen and excited with light of a certain wavelength. The reading instrument, similar in size to a metal detector, produces the excitation light and measures the emission return light signal from the implant. Similar implantable biosensors that use skin-attached reading instruments are commercially available in the market and are approved by regulators for continuously measuring oxygen in humans. Unlike human applications that use a skin attached reader, the proposed technology uses a rugged outdoor system for beef and dairy applications to read the implant sensor at a distance of few centimeters several times a day for early detection of illness. To date, implants and a reader system to interrogate implantable oxygen and temperature sensors have been designed for use at a distance of 12 cm. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.