The wearable health device on your wrist can tell you your heart rate and how many steps you took today. What it cannot tell you is whether your cortisol is elevated, your inflammatory markers are rising, or your medication is achieving therapeutic levels in your bloodstream. That gap between what biosensors currently measure and what clinicians and patients actually need to know sits at the center of a major new federal research initiative — one that could fundamentally change how Americans monitor their own health and how the medical system detects disease before it becomes crisis.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) formally launched its Delphi program on April 1, 2026, posting a solicitation on SAM.gov and opening competition for multidisciplinary research teams to develop a new generation of wearable and ingestible biosensors. The program is led by the ARPA-H Resilient Systems Office. Named for the ancient oracle’s injunction to “know thyself,” Delphi aims to give Americans continuous, real-time insight into the deep biological signals their bodies produce around the clock.
The Problem: Biosensors That Can’t See What Matters Most
Today’s wearable and ingestible sensors are largely limited to biophysical data such as heart rate and pulse oximetry, or high-concentration metabolites like blood glucose. These are useful signals, but they represent only a narrow slice of the biological information that governs health and disease. Hormones, cytokines, inflammatory markers, and circulating drug levels — the chemical language through which the body regulates itself and responds to therapy — remain largely invisible to continuous monitoring technology.
The hardware problem compounds the data problem. Current biosensor platforms are typically built around one-off, application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designs that are expensive to develop, difficult to update, and locked to a single sensing function. Every new biosensor application effectively requires reinventing the device from scratch, keeping costs high, slowing innovation, and limiting the range of analytes that can be tracked.
What Delphi Is Asking For
The Delphi program’s central technical bet is that a shift to chiplet-based architecture can solve both problems simultaneously. Chiplets are modular microelectronic components that can be mixed, matched, and reconfigured across different device designs without the cost and rigidity of custom ASICs. By building biosensors from reusable chiplet building blocks, Delphi aims to create an open, flexible development ecosystem that dramatically lowers the cost and time required to bring new sensing capabilities to market.
The solicitation organizes the technical work into three core areas. The first covers “dry” chiplets: the power management and secure communications components that keep a body-worn device running efficiently and transmit sensitive health data securely. Given that a quantum computing breakthrough capable of compromising current encryption standards may arrive within the program’s timeframe, Delphi is specifically seeking post-quantum secure communications capabilities built into the chiplet architecture.
The second and most scientifically demanding area covers “wet” biosensor chiplets: the components that directly interface with the body to detect low-concentration biochemical markers such as hormones and cytokines. Pushing continuous biosensing from high-concentration metabolites down to the hormone and cytokine range represents a significant frontier in bioanalytical science, and Delphi is explicitly seeking novel molecular probe designs, advanced surface chemistry approaches, and creative detection strategies to get there.
The third area covers biocompatible encapsulation: packaging that hermetically seals the electronic components while simultaneously exposing the sensing interface to biological fluids. This dual requirement, protecting delicate electronics while maintaining biological access, is a non-trivial engineering challenge that existing encapsulation approaches have not fully solved at chiplet scale.
A fourth technical area addresses translation and scale, requiring proposing teams to demonstrate not just scientific capability but a credible path to manufacturing and commercialization. ARPA-H made clear at the March 27 Proposers’ Day that teams without demonstrated scalable manufacturing capability are unlikely to be competitive. The program envisions reaching tens of millions of devices, and proposals that cannot credibly address that scale will not advance.
The Program Structure and Public Health Stakes
Delphi is structured in three phases. Phase one builds the individual chiplet components. Phase two integrates them into functional devices and begins preclinical testing. Phase three involves either human factors testing, for noninvasive devices that do not require FDA clearance, or a clinical trial, for minimally invasive or ingestible devices that do. A distinctive feature of the program is what ARPA-H calls a “remix” capability: in phase two, teams will be directed to apply their chiplet platform to a second sensing target selected from a shortlist they propose, and in phase three to a third target selected by ARPA-H. This tests the platform’s modularity and generalizability, not just its performance on a single analyte.
Continuous, secure monitoring of hormones, inflammatory markers, and drug levels could transform management of chronic disease, enable safe hospital-to-home transition for recovering patients, and support precision dosing of therapies where therapeutic windows are narrow and consequences of deviation are serious. For public health and biosecurity applications, a low-cost, modular biosensing platform capable of tracking immune markers and inflammatory signals at population scale would represent a significant leap in early warning and surveillance capability — potentially detecting biological threats or emerging outbreaks faster than current passive surveillance systems allow.
ARPA-H program officials framed the ambition plainly at Proposers’ Day: almost everything the agency wants to accomplish depends on having high-quality, continuous knowledge of what is happening inside the body. Delphi is the program designed to make that possible.
Sources and further reading:
Delphi ARPA-H-SOL-26-153 Solicitation – SAM.gov
DELPHI Proposers’ Day Presentation (03/27/26) – YouTube
Delphi Program Overview – ARPA-H
Delphi Teaming Profiles – ARPA-H