SPECTROSCOPY FEATURE
pressure, core body temperature, lactate, and glucose levels for the first time,’ he said.
The technology is built on the company’s silicon photonics platform. The spectrometer chip provides up to a million times higher resolution, a thousand times higher accuracy and a hundred times broader bandwidth than LED technology on existing wearables today, Rickman said. ‘Another way of looking at it is that we’ve shrunk a laboratory spectrometer onto a chip, creating a “clinic on a wrist”.’
The chip comprises numerous infrared
lasers and a second LED-based element, which is already being used in wearables to detect pulse and blood oxygen. Electronics and an ASIC controller are also being developed. The basic module contains the kind of functionality already available in a high-end smart-watch, such as blood oxygen, heart rate and breath rate. But, said Rickman, it adds biomarkers such as hydration, core body temperature, and blood pressure. ‘Adding onto that in the advanced module,’ he said, ‘which has roughly double the number of lasers as the basic module, we extend the infrared spectroscopy range and use more advanced algorithms to detect alcohol,
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‘Our module compresses the sensing capabilities of a tabletop clinical spectrometer into a wearable chip that could be carried on your wrist’
carbon monoxide, glucose indicator and lactate.’ Rockley’s technology could be on wrists as soon as next year, according to Rickman, followed by a significant volume ramp in 2023.
Home diagnosis For the end-user, this kind of technology could provide a device that is designed to work anywhere on the body where there’s reasonable blood perfusion. Rickman elaborated: ‘It could be in
a smartphone or smart speaker where you place your finger on it, or a smart patch that you place on your chest, as a smart earbud, and so on. We believe this will dramatically change the way that people think about their diet, nutrition, and monitoring their health and fitness. There’s also the opportunity for this technology to provide early warning signs of the onset of diseases, so a more efficient
treatment of those diseases can take place.’ For OEM customers, Rickman noted
that the full-feature device isn’t intended to be complete. ‘This was developed for medical collaboration,’ he said. ‘We offer a full stack of technology capabilities to our OEM customers, ranging from the silicon and III-V photonics and electronics design, the co-packaging technology to put electronics and photonics together, the firmware/software to run the chips, and importantly, the biosensing algorithms and cloud analytics to measure and read individual biomarkers. ‘We’ve built in-house big data analytics to support our development efforts, creating the possibility of additional monetisation with customers through a B2B cloud-subscription model.’
Smaller than a human hair Researchers from Fengnian Xia laboratory, Yale University, Bar-Ilan University and Japan’s National Institute for Materials have developed a mid-infrared spectrometer smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Published in Nature Photonics, the
device incorporates black phosphorus, a material that has long been a focus of the Xia lab, for a spectrometer operational
July 2021 Electro Optics 19 g
Anna Hoychuk /
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