Implementation of New Class of Smart Actuating Materials in Biocompatible Devices

Miniature devices are revolutionizing the health sector and are constantly getting closer and closer to the human body. Many exciting and novel applications of miniature devices find use in diabetics, breathalyzers for alcohol screening, continuously monitoring the patients' heartbeat or via releasing drugs directly into the bloodstream.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Global demographic development with a sharp increase in the number of elderly people puts the global health sectors under pressure, increasing the need for intelligent, efficient and affordable biomedical devices that can meet the challenges of lifestyle diseases, aging and the overall pressure on healthcare systems.

Biowings, a recently granted research project led by DTU and supported by the EU program FET-Open, is aiming at developing a new kind of biocompatible actuating materials for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), enabling development of advanced non-toxic miniature devices with integrated diagnostic, pronostic and therapeutic functions.

The goal is to make these devices suitable for use outside and inside the human body.

"There are already a number of microelectro-mechanical systems in the market, but they often contain elements such as lead (Pb) which is harmful to the human body. The goal is to develop biocompatible materials with actuating properties similar or better than the one which already exist today (Pb[Zr(x)Ti(1-x)]O3, known as PZT), and which do not contain any harmful elements, "says Professor Nini Pryds, DTU Energy, coordinator of project ”BioWings - Bio-compatible electrostrictive smart materials for future generation of medical micro-electro-mechanical systems”.

The reason is that DTU Energy is experts in these types of oxide materials, and DTU Energy has recently intensified the research into actuation materials following a number of groundbreaking discoveries of the electromechanical properties of cerium-based oxide materials.

"The cerium-based oxide materials are non-toxic, environmentally friendly and well-functioning in low energy units, and as such they are perfectly suited as biocompatible materials in BioWings", says Professor Vincenzo Esposito, who is the coordinator of the activity on electrochemical conversion at DTU Energy.

These actuating materials, Cerium-based oxide, are also fully compatible with silicon, which allows the integration of these materials directly onto silicon technology without the need of any intermediate expensive layer which is otherwise used when PZT is implemented on Silicon.

In collaboration with DTU Physics and six international partners, the DTU-researchers aim for a better understanding of the electrostrictive properties of cerium-based oxide materials and how to use these properties to create new types of MEMS for the medical industry.

If the group, consisting of industrial, medical and research partners, succeeds in making a prototype able to integrate cerium oxide in biomedical electromechanical systems, it will lead to a big step forward for the use of new and non-harmful materials in implanted diagnostic systems.