Medical Sensors Attached to Skin
Soon wearable electronics could be used for precision medical sensors attached to the skin and designed to perform health monitoring and diagnosis. Worn routinely, future wearable electronics could potentially detect possible emerging health problems such as heart disease, cancer, or MS.
This type of skin like device is being developed in a project between the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Lab https://www.anl.gov and the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) https://pme.uchicago.edu. Leading the project is Sihong Wang, Assistant Professor at the UChicago PME.
The device could also do a personalized analysis of the tracked health data while minimizing the need for wireless transmission. However, the device would need to collect and process a vast amount of data, well above what even the best smartwatches can do today. However, the data crunching would need to use very low power consumption in a very tiny space.
The other major challenge is to integrate the electronics into a skin like stretchable material. Today, the key material in any electronic device is a semiconductor that is used in cell phones and computers which is normally a solid silicon chip. Stretchable electronics require that the semiconductor be a highly flexible material that is still able to conduct electricity.
The team’s chip consists of a thin film of a plastic semiconductor combined with stretchable gold nanowire electrodes. Even when stretched to twice its normal size, the device functioned as planned without formation of any cracks.
The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, NSF, and a start-up fund from the University of Chicago. The research was published in “Matter” in a paper on August 2022, titled “Intrinsically Stretchable Neuromorphic Devices For On-Body Processing of Health Data with AI.”