Principal Investigator: Professor Ho Ghim Wei, ECE

So far, the wearable electronics remain at the proof-of-concept phase as they still face many fundamental challenges and technological gaps. Currently, the parameters measured by the existing skin electronic systems are narrow in scope and have low clinical accuracy. Also, there are difficulties in maintaining a stable and intimate interfacing of sensors to the soft, curvilinear and time-dynamic human body surfaces. As such, motion induced artefacts and/or sweat pooling from daily physical activities could easily fail the signal reliability. Besides, in a multimodal sensing system, signal interferences from the environment can greatly impact the sensing accuracy and mandate system calibration whenever the situational changes take place.

Here, we propose an entirely soft wearable skin-like electronic system made up of gel embedded with multimodal and non-interfering receptors, termed as artificial SKin Integrated Network (SKIN). The objectives of our research  include;
(1) Development of stretchable, adhesive and self-healable skin-like soft electronics that are motion, sweat and water proof.
(2) Design of synchronous and decoupled sensors aiming at different physiological parameters with localized detection and vibrational/thermal stimulation to skin, applicable for point-of-care treatment.
(3) Evaluation of the measured physiological data of the artificial SKIN on different body parts to meet clinical reliance and accuracy.