Printed Multifunctional Flexible Healthcare Patch

Macroscale, multifunctional, flexible/stretchable devices are of great interest for the human-interactive applications including health monitoring as one of wearable device concepts. For the device applications, flexible sensor sheets directly attached onto skin may be a next class of wearable electronics to collect a variety of information from human body such as body temperature, electrocardiogram (ECG), aspiration, and chemical contents of glucose etc, which multiple information detections cannot be realized by a conventional watch-type wearable device. These multiple simultaneous condition detections allow it to predict the disease in advance by just attaching the sensor sheets. For moving forward to the future healthcare society, there are still a lot of issues and problems to address. The first important technology is how to realize disposal low-cost devices for considering hygiene issue due to direct attachment on skin like a bandage. Another is multiple functionalities to collect different conditions simultaneously to diagnose it. Based on these, realizing the low-cost multifunctional flexible healthcare patch is important advance not only for healthcare application [1], but also for internet of things (IoT) and trillion sensor concepts. This study demonstrates macroscale printing techniques and their flexible sensor sheet applications. Using printed strain [2-3], temperature [4-5], ultraviolet [6], and electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors [6-7], healthcare patch is presented to detect health conditions as well as human motion using printed flexible three-axis acceleration sensor [6,8]. In addition, although the study is still preliminary, high sensitive sweat chemical sensor is discussed for the future electronics [9]. Our studies focus on the low-cost multi-functional sensor components. To realize a practical sensor sheet, different components such as signal processing/wireless circuits and batteries are required to develop. Step-by-step developments and collaborations between different fields of researchers will be important to build a next generation electronics platform.