Disruptive, Soft, Wearable Sensors

Abstract

www.advmat.de www.advancedsciencenews.com Such soft wearable devices will be lightweight and thin, soft, and elastic, inexpensive, and durable. These devices will be skinattachable, flexible, stretchable, bendable and twistable whilst maintaining excellent sensing performances. Such disruptive WT products will ultimately transform current rigid wearable 1.0 to future wearable 2.0 products (Figure 1), enabling sensitive, accurate yet specific health monitoring anytime and anywhere.While the disruptive soft WT is still in the embryonic stage of development, there have been intensive worldwide materials [1c,8] push with a purpose to develop thinner, softer, ideally invisible and unfeelable electronics. [9] Unlike wearable 1.0 which typically starts from device, wearable 2.0 requires the design starts from materials innovation. In this context, novel structural design and the use of novel materials are the two viable strategies. [1b,10] For the former, serpentine design and prestrained treatment enable the stretchabilities; [11] as for the later, various nanomaterials including silver nanowires, [12] gold nanowires, [13] carbon nanotubes, [14] and graphene [15] have been widely explored.A typical soft WT research covers comprehensively all the key components in progressive sequences, namely, wear → sense → communicate → analyze → interpret → decide (Figure 2). This requires multidisciplinary collaborations across interdisciplinary boundaries. As a starting point, wearable materials should be designed to consider factors such as in soft/hard material interface, breathability, biocompatibility, etc. Then wearable sensors may be fabricated and evaluated with regards to key parameters including sensitivity, specificity, reusability, and durability. Once the sensors' performances have been fully evaluated, their integration with wireless modules such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or wireless fidelity (WIFI) needs to be considered. One of key limitations is the wearable powering solution. It is encouraging to see the commercial products of paper lithium battery and development of soft energy devices in academia. [16] In addition to hardware, designing user-friendly graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is necessary and the development of suitable apps is important for seamless data acquisition of timelapsed biometric signals in a wireless manner. The signals will be then analyzed and interpreted, enabling efficient algorithm for rapid signal processing and decision support. The analysis of electrical signals will help understand and predict the relationship between biometric data and sensing signals generated by soft wearable materials. This will allow us to understand the key parameters related to biological conditions such as cardiac health, [17] sporting activities, [18] and aged care behaviors. [19] Here, we discuss all of the above key aspects of next-generation of disruptive soft wearable technologies but with a focus on materials aspect. Nevertheless, it also emphasizes the significance of cross-disciplinary colla...

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