Sweet sweat sensors Fire near campus

A house close to campus near Huntington Drive caught fire on the evening of Saturday, Sept. 4.

Firefighters arrived on scene at approximately 8:30 p.m. and attempted to contain the damage; roughly four fire trucks, as well as electrical emergency services and other emergency vehicles, were present.

The fire was thought to have been due to a grill mishap, though the cause has yet to be confirmed.

Flames and smoke could be seen from streets away, and according to UTD graduate student and eyewitness Israel Flores, who was walking back from dinner near the area, “another bystander directly across from the house’s backyard on

Devansingh Sankhala, Kai-Chun Lin, Badrinath Jagannath and Madhavi Pali.

A UTD research team recently created sweat sensors that detect the body’s immune response to viral infections.

With funding from the North Texasbased company EnLiSense, UTD scientists in 2018 wanted to develop a noninvasive device that would detect and alert if a person was exposed to the Influenza virus. UTD bioengineering professor Shalini Prasad is the co-founder of EnLiSense and has actively been working on this project at the Biomedical Microdevices and Nanotechnology Lab with her research team, including

“In 2018, the biggest seasonal epidemic we had was Influenza,” Prasad said. “The vision was to track and notify people if they have the virus.”

The sweat sensor looks for cytokines – messenger molecules that your body releases when infected – in your passive sweat. This means that users don’t have to do anything for the device to detect inflammation.

“Passive sweat is sweat that you and I would sweat right now in an air-conditioned room. You don’t necessarily have to work out or do any sort of exer - cise for this kind of sweat,” Prasad said. The sensor cannot tell what kind of virus you have, but it can monitor and alert individuals to get a diagnostic test, such as a flu or COVID-19 test.

And after the pandemic hit, Prasad and her team noticed a massive elevation in the rates of cytokines detected in patients with COVID-19. It differed greatly in number from the rate of cytokines detected in Influenza patients.

“We discovered that we could essentially repurpose the sweat sensor to figure out the trajectory of an individ -

Waterview Drive said the fire was raging enough that she ‘was afraid the flames would spread to the leaves of the trees.’”

Moreover, Flores said, “the volume of water firefighters applied to the burning home was impressive and overflowed the nearby storm drains flooding a portion of Cheyenne Drive.”

The occurrence was very close in proximity to campus, with Housing Operations sending a campus-wide email blast advising students not to be alarmed “in the event [they] smell smoke or a burning smell.”

No one appeared to be harmed and all members of the home evacuated safely. Our webpage will be updated with more information as it becomes available.

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