Ville de Lausanne Award 2019 – Francesca Stradolini

"For opening of new frontiers and pioneering contributions in the field of online monitoring of anaesthesia by proposing innovative solutions for multi-panel bioelectronic devices with internet connectivity."

After failure of ”One-Size-Fits-All” approach on diseases treatment, the age of personalized medicine came into being for tailoring critical treatments such as anesthesia. General anesthesia induces a reversible unconsciousness state via a cocktail of drugs: hypnotic, as propofol, analgesic, as paracetamol, myorelaxant, as midazolam. A balanced delivery of these synergic drugs is crucial to achieve and maintain the sedation avoiding over-/under-doses. Nowadays, infusion pumps evaluates their delivery based on mathematical pharmaco-kinetic models, that, however, fail to reproduce inter-patient metabolism variability falling into the ”One-Size-Fits-All” category. A personalized drug dosage can be achieved only by monitoring the patient’s sedation status. Hence, this thesis presents the design and validation of a complete system for long-time continuous monitoring of anesthetics’ concentrations in patient’s blood. The system consists of: a custom-built Raspberry-Pi-based electronic board driving electrochemical sensors for propofol, paracetamol and midazolam detection, a fluidic device driving the sample to sensing sites, an Android-OS-based IoT network keeping the anesthesiologist connected.

Highlights:

• Fouling-free propofol monitoring with Pencil Graphite Electrode with specific composition (graphite/clay/wax)
• Novel multi-panel system for monitoring several drugs in complex bio-fluids (undiluted human serum).
• Demonstration of simultaneous monitoring of drugs’ concentrations over-time.
• Powerful IoT network providing fast data visualization, emergency alarm and cloud-support