(FREE) Electronic Textiles and Intelligent Skin Patches: Hardware and Software

Since advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and other cutting-edge self-driving innovations hit the automotive market, reliable LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and RADAR (Radio Detection and Ranging) systems are crucial in the development of advanced self-driving vehicles. One significant challenge in this relation, is to guarantee clear visibility of those systems even in the harshest environmental conditions. For the sensor cover, especially the accretion of snow and ice as well as fogging is a significant issue that needs to be solved.
To ensure visibility during winter time, the RADAR and LiDAR sensor covers are currently equipped with wire based heating solutions. This state of the art solution is coming with some technological challenges during the manufacturing process, that is causing significant scrap rates. The homogeneity of the sensor cover temperature is often inadequate and overheating or even burning issues have been detected.
This presentation focuses on sensor cover heaters by means of printed electronics. Besides the heating functionality, also ice and temperature sensors are embedded in the heating solution, allowing for a heating- on-demand functionality that is energy efficient and provides a significant safety advantage.

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The HealthTech market is a rapidly expanding arena with a wide range of new applications and technologies being developed. From personal diagnostics to point-of-care treatments, a key objective of the design of new HealthTech products is their adoption and use by patients which does not always meet the aims of product manufacturers. One of the key factors in user adoption is the ease of use of products and this is strongly influenced by their form factor. Flexible electronics provides a new paradigm for electronic product design which can be optimally exploited in HealthTech products. Unobtrusive wearables, smart garments and smart patches are starting to gain traction in the market place as the new technologies behind them are adopted and become mainstream. This presentation will discuss the flexible electronics technologies which can be used for HealthTech products and provide real world examples of devices which are helping to improve the health outcomes for patients.

Anisotropic Conductive Adhesive films for room temperature, low pressure bonding will shortly be available for commercial use. What is the performance of these films, and how can they add freedom and value in designing and manufacturing new products in the area of wearables, flexible, and hybrid electronics?
An update on the availability and road-map for this product range will be presented, as well as application examples and performance data. Process savings will be discussed, related to the fact this bonding technique does not require heat nor additional pressure, and investments related to mounting equipment is moderate.

View the full video presentation here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-TocfDHq5Y

Recent years development of wearables evolves at the edge of the textile - and electronics industry with new demands for the supply chain. Printed electronics is a promising technology that bridges the gap between manufacturing cost, requests for advance vital sign monitoring and washability of most clothing. Endorsement of industry standards and technology capacities goes hand in hand to meet the demand for next generation wearables. In this talk, DTI’s speakers will present an outlook for printed electronics in this segment and demonstrate why e-textiles soon will play a significant role in healthcare, sport, and personal protective equipment.

View the full video presentation here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-TocfDHq5Y

Recent years development of wearables evolves at the edge of the textile - and electronics industry with new demands for the supply chain. Printed electronics is a promising technology that bridges the gap between manufacturing cost, requests for advance vital sign monitoring and washability of most clothing. Endorsement of industry standards and technology capacities goes hand in hand to meet the demand for next generation wearables. In this talk, DTI’s speakers will present an outlook for printed electronics in this segment and demonstrate why e-textiles soon will play a significant role in healthcare, sport, and personal protective equipment.

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Nanocelluloses have been subject to a recent interest in many fields. Nanocelluloses and especially cellulose microfibrils (MFC) are renewable and bio-degradable material having exceptional properties. The use of MFC as stabilizing agent offers a green way to replace petro-chemical surfactants usually needed to stabilize inorganic particles. The high aspect ratio of MFC allows it to form transparent hydrogel and films once dried.
Silver nanowires are high aspect ratio silver particles which have been used to achieve transparent and conductive layers.
Encres Dubuit - Poly-Ink has used these innovative materials to develop very stable conductive inks based on silver nanowires and MFC. These inks are suitable for screen-printing and coating processes. Transparent conductive films have been produced with high opto-electrical properties without any sintering. The obtained films showed an increase adhesion to substrate and resistance to oxidation thanks to the use of MFC.
These transparent conductive electrodes can then be integrated in opto-electronic devices such as membrane switches, touchpads, displays or solar cells.

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In this talk, Dr. Yeo will discuss the fundamental study in soft materials, flexible mechanics, nanomanufacturing, machine learning, and system packaging to develop nanomembrane-based intelligent soft wearable biosensors and bioelectronics. He will also talk about how fundamental science and knowledge can be applied to create various types of wearable soft sensors, circuits, and integrated bioelectronics. Afterward, he will share application examples of the wearable soft system as a portable health monitoring device, disease diagnostic device, therapeutic system, and human-machine interface system. Details of a device design, manufacturing, optimization, signal processing, and classification will be shared at high levels.

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MesoMat has developed plastic based yarns which are able to conduct electricity even as they are stretched like a rubber band. This material, which consists of many polymer filaments that are each coated with conductive nanoparticles and bundled into a yarn, is piezo-resistive, meaning as it is stretched or compressed there is a change in its electrical conductivity. Therefore, these yarns offer a simple method to sense strain which provides numerous advantages over conventional sensing techniques. Most importantly, whereas most commercially available strain gauges can measure strains on the order of 1% at most, these sensing yarns are able to measure strains as large as 20%, making them ideally suited for high deformation environments such as the human body. Secondly, in contrast with traditional point sensors which provide feedback at specific locations, these yarns are global sensors and detect strain anywhere along their length.
Sensing yarns are combined with electronics and software to provide a complete platform that can be used to measure performance, optimize manufacturing or detect failure in high strain materials that are otherwise difficult to sense such as composites, plastics, rubbers and textiles. Example use cases range from monitoring widely used industrial and automotive components to sensing in garments and wearables.

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The world is rapidly moving toward the internet of things (IoT), where everything around us will be made smart, and so does the need for low-cost, eco-friendly, and fast design-to-manufacturing technologies to integrate various electronics and devices onto these objects. This has led to a high interest in additively manufactured electronics (AME) or so-called printed electronics, as it can potentially enable IoT with a wide range of applications in electronics, healthcare, automotive, aerospace, defense, and energy industries. However, the current printing technologies are based on wet printing methods such as inkjet and aerosol jet printers that suffer from complex and expensive ink formulation, limited printing material options, contaminations, and time-consuming post-processing.

This talk will present the world’s first “dry multimaterial printer” that transforms the printing of functional materials and devices for electronics, energy, healthcare, agriculture, transportation, and defense applications. This disruptive technology revolutionizes printing from a traditional liquid-based to dry printing technology. The Key technology advantages include 1) on-demand and in-situ generation of various pure nanoparticles without contaminations, 2) in-situ and real-time laser sintering of nanoparticles on various substrates with no further post-processing, 3) multimaterial printing of hybrid and composite materials and structures. The liquid-free nature of the system, the tunable flow dynamic of the nanoparticles, and the real-time sintering mechanism make it uniquely suitable for operating both on the earth and in space. Moreover, this technology is capable of printing sensitive materials such as copper on biodegradable substrates such as paper.

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In this presentation, Lok will share the development process of a smart apparel with ECG sensing. The process includes material formulation for printability, washability and safety, coating and patterning of electrode, fabric and apparel integration, functional testing and reliability validation. The smart apparel was tested by a third party for machine wash resistance and toxicity. Over 100 machine wash cycles were achieved through material and manufacturing innovations. The challenges in consumer acceptance will be discussed.

Self-powered, highly unobtrusive, low-cost and accurate arterial pulse wave monitoring devices need to be developed to enable cost-efficient monitoring of entire cardiovascular disease risk groups. Wearable sensors with ultra-thin form factor have been recently developed to meet these demands, but the scalable fabrication of such devices has not been addressed sufficiently and the accuracy of the devices more in-depth investigation.

In our study, we report the development of a printing based fabrication process for a highly unobtrusive piezoelectric ultra-thin (t ~ 4,2 µm) e-tattoo arterial pulse wave sensor which utilizes only transparent and biocompatible polymer-based materials. The ferroelectric performance of the ultra-thin P(VDF-TrFE) material layer is optimized through the use of crosslinked PEDOT:PSS electrodes; this results in ~70 % and ~34 % improvements in remanent polarization (Pr) and coercive field (Ec), respectively, when compared to the sensors with pristine PEDOT:PSS electrodes. The ultra-thin form factor enables access to the high bending mode sensitivity of the P(VDF-TrFE) material layer; the maximum sensitivity value achieved in uniaxial and multiaxial bending is ~1700 pC N-1, which is ~50 times higher than the measured normal mode sensitivity. The increased sensitivity is linked to a specific set of direct piezoelectric coefficients using combination of experimental results, statistical analysis and finite element modeling.

Finally, the accuracy of the e-tattoo sensor is demonstrated in the non-invasive measurement of radial artery pulse wave by comparing the signal to that obtained with reference device from 7 study subjects.

Migraine is a widespread medical condition, and it can have a substantial burden
of illness. The one-year migraine period prevalence is 18% in women and 6% in
men, averaging in about 12% of world’s population suffering from this condition.
Among neurologic conditions, it ranks second worldwide in terms of years lost to
disability. Migraines can severely affect patient’s quality of life and prevent from
carrying out normal daily activities. Some people find they need to stay in bed for
days at a time.
The exact cause of migraines is unknown, but they're thought to be the result
of abnormal brain activity temporarily affecting nerve signals, chemicals, and
blood vessels in the brain. There's no cure for migraines yet. But number of
treatments can help reduce/stop symptoms or keep them from getting worse.
The American Headache Society recently published a Consensus Statement
update on the use of newly introduced treatments for migraine, including the
use of a remote electrical neuromodulation device for acute treatments. Remote
electrical neuromodulation (REN) method of action is based on invocation of
conditioned pain modulation (CPM), an endogenous analgesic mechanism in
which conditioning stimulation inhibits pain in remote body regions. In the past,
CPM or similar effects have been previously described using different
terminologies such as diffuse noxious inhibitory control (DNIC), heterotopic
noxious conditioning stimulation (HNCS) or endogenous analgesia (EA).
In this presentation I will discuss the Nerivio®, a wearable medical device,
implementing REN. The device is cleared by FDA and received CE mark under the
new medical device regulations for acute chronic and episodic migraine
treatment in adults and adolescents of 12 years old and above.

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Monitoring complex health-related electrophysiological signals such as arterial blood pressure (BP) in ambulatory settings is essential for a proper understanding of health conditions, predominantly cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, continuous long-term monitoring of BP for patients with sleep apnea, stroke, or hypertension is essential to understand their health risk factors and build preventative care routines. While conventional ambulatory BP monitoring devices exist, they are uncomfortable, bulky, and intrusive. The common drawbacks of all these systems are their bulkiness and incompatibility with skin’s elastic properties, causing sensor’s displacement during usage, consequently requiring frequent system re-calibration.
In our work, we introduce a unique wearable BP monitoring technology that leverages atomically-thin and electrically conductive graphene electronic tattoos (GETs) as main building blocks. The GETs are placed over the radial and ulnar arteries on the wrist and subsequently used as current injection and voltage sensing electrodes, measuring arterial bioimpedance. In contrast to any other wearable system, the atomically thin, lightweight, and skin-conformable GETs do not apply any external tension onto the skin during the operation. Hence, they are able to perform long-term and nocturnal measurements without discomforting the subjects. Using bioimpedance modality allows us to disregard the tattoo-skin interface, which is typically 2-4 orders of magnitude larger compared to tissue impedance, and record only from the areas of interest. Employing a machine learning regression model on the recorded bioimpedance value, we yield effective beat-to-beat detection of diastolic and systolic BP values with grade-A accuracy. Besides BP, we show that the same Bio-Z signal can be post-processed to estimate person’s RR in an entirely wearable and non-invasive manner.

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Electroencephalography (EEG) and surface electromyography (sEMG) are notoriously cumbersome technologies. A typical setup may involve bulky electrodes, dangling wires, and a large amplifier unit. Adapting these technologies to numerous applications has been accordingly fairly limited. Thanks to the availability of printed electronics, and low-power electronics it is now possible to effectively simplify these techniques to form skin electrophysiology with unprecedented performances, eliminating the need to handle multiple electrodes, wires and amplification units. Specifically, in this presentation, I will focus on the advantages of a newly developed soft printed electrodes which we developed in recent years. The system builds on soft electrodes with wireless signal transmission allowing electrode-skin stability, and user convenience during prolonged use (hours). Deep learning and blind source separation methods can also be used to enhance system performances, in particular reducing variability between individuals and sessions.

The presentation will outline several important applications and how each can benefit from the convergence of electrophysiology and novel skin electrophysiology. In the field of sleep, we validated the system against PSG, the gold standard in medical sleep staging and demonstrated its ability to perform sleep staging at home and detection of REM sleep without atonia (RSWA). The system was further used in other applications such as high-resolution facial EMG, finger gesture recognition and in rehabilitation, demonstrating the ability to obtain stable electrophysiological data under natural recording conditions.

Printed sensors and electronics are the platform for developing and manufacturing wearable biosensors for improving the analytics available to athletes.

In this talk we will discuss:

1) Lactate sensors, suitable for monitoring anaerobic respiration.
2) Glucose sensors, suitable to understand the fuel in the body.
3) Hydration sensors, understand the ratio of water to electrolytes.
4) Cortisol sensors, understand the stress on the athlete.
5) Testosterone sensors, understand the hormonal state of the athlete.

The printed 5G Smart Surface has been successfully demonstrated in both indoor and outdoor applications and can be installed on surfaces such as billboards, windows, walls, paintings etc. Since the 5G Smart Surface does not require a power source, it provides a highly cost-efficient solution to enhance mm-wave coverage.