Sameer R Sonkusale
Tufts University, MA·Biomedical Engineering
Small medical devices that are worn on the skin or swallowed could watch over health continuously, outside the clinic. Making them practical means solving several problems at once: they must be safe, comfortable, powered without bulky batteries, and able to collect useful data on their own.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
bioelectronics
wearable sensors
ingestible devices
- Grants
- 3 known grants, through Sep 2028
What they work on
- Build an osmotic battery that makes power from salt differences, using cation- and anion-selective membranes made of two-dimensional nanomaterials and ion-infused aerogels in a dry gelatin design, targeting hundreds of microwatts at under 10 grams.
- Study how ions move through nanostructured membranes to understand and improve energy harvesting from salinity gradients in fluids such as sweat, saliva and urine.
- Develop flexible, breathable eutectogel sensor patches, made from a soft conductive gel, that continuously track gait, posture, head motion, heart rate variability, breathing and movement in older adults.
- Create statistical machine learning models for multiple time series that estimate cognitive function and mobility over time from patch data, and test them in 20 older adults in the lab and in daily life.
- Design and test a 3D-printed motorized micro-pill whose pH and oxygen sensors trigger sampling at chosen gut sites, testing it in fluids mimicking gut contents, in pig intestines outside the body and in live pigs.
- Test micro-pill sampling in human adults in a randomized crossover trial comparing how plant-based and meat-based diets change gut microbes at different intestinal sites.
More about the research
The projects tackle all three: a new kind of battery that runs on salt differences in body fluids, soft wearable sensors paired with machine learning to track aging adults, and a swallowable pill that samples gut bacteria at chosen spots in the intestine.
Why it matters
Lightweight, lithium-free batteries could power wearable sensors, diagnostics and ingestible electronics more safely and sustainably. Continuous wearable monitoring may reveal subtle early declines in thinking and mobility in older adults, opening an early window to delay or prevent Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. A pill that samples gut microbes at specific sites could support precision nutrition advice aimed at long-term health.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Osmotic powering of ingestible and wearable devices using cationic and anionic nanofluidic membranes
NSF · Oct 2025 – Sep 2028
SCH: Multi-modal Biosensing and Predictive Analytics for Continuous Monitoring of Mobility and Cognition in an Aging Population
NIH · Aug 2024 – May 2028
Ingestible Pill for spatially targeted sampling of gut microbiome
NIH · Jun 2022 – Jun 2027
Closest labs
Ziwei Ma
University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, TN·Biomedical Engineering
Develop energy-efficient sensing approaches and feature-extraction methods for multimodal wearable sensors, to capture informative movement signals during rehabilitation outside the clinic.
Phuc Nguyen
University of Massachusetts, MA·Computer Science·Early-career
Build computational models that translate jaw movement and faint facial vibrations, captured by an ear-worn sensor, into speech sounds and commands so users can control devices silently.
Alex Abramson
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Develop a molecularly imprinted polymer sensor, a plastic film that captures cortisol, that resists stomach acid and abrasion, using covalent anchoring chemistry for rapid electrochemical regeneration.
The school
Tufts University: 19 labs on PI Pages, $278M a year on research, 144 research doctorates a year.
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