Skin-Integrated Sensing and Haptic Feedback Electronics for Health Monitoring and Sudden Illnesses Early Warning

Description

Wearable systems enable measuring a broad range of biomedical, environmental and physiological signals to provide important information of human health and surroundings. Commercial available wearable electronics, such as wearable bands, smartphones and smart watches that can monitor and analyze some basic information including body temperature, heartbeats, and physical activities. However, these wearable electronics still has limitations from compatibility with body, to accuracy, and to physical demission, which may cause irritation/discomfort and inaccuracy. Thin, soft, skin-integrated and biocompatible electronics are considered as the key point to address the wearable technologies because they cannot only facilitate conformably mounting on external surface of our body, such as skin, but also laminating on the internal surface of the organ tissues, such as heart and brain. Flexible and stretchable electronics provide the possibility to establish a platform for bio-integrated system, where long term integration is possible on different locations of the human body with negligible concerns of discomfort or irritation. With the assistance of wireless technologies, the information can be uploaded onto the cloud for real time monitoring and evaluating health status of the body. Thus, early detection of diseases and early warning of sudden illnesses may be possible with certain warning systems. Efforts toward to the flexible skin-integrated electronics have been made mainly in developing soft bio-sensors, however, the reports of the integration of early warning systems associated with stimulating to mechanoreceptors or thermoreceptors in flexible platforms is very seldom. Haptic actuators are no doubt the great candidate for the early warning system, as which can be triggered when the sensors detect any potential dangers of the body, such as high temperature, high pressure and abnormal heartbeat. Developing such a comprehensive system with both soft sensors and actuators can be considered as the next generation technology for wearable healthcare with the function of on-patient health monitoring and sudden illnesses early warning. Here we propose a concept of skin-integrated sensing and haptic electronics based on materials and devices for realizing ultra-thin, flexible electronics that incorporates functional healthcare related sensors and haptic mechanical actuators for the application in monitoring physiological signals and mechanically stimulating skin for early warning. Such platform can in-real time monitor qualitative and quantitative information on body temperature and pulse wave dynamics, and provide haptic actuation when needed for early warning of sudden illnesses that associate with abnormal physiological signals.