A Stretchable and Flexible Platform for Epidermal Electronics

The society is aging and therefore there is a need for new mobile and reliable health monitoring systems. An idea of such wireless, stretchable and mobile health monitoring platform has been developed. It consists of a wireless stretchable, biocompatible sensor tag placed on the skin and an RFID reader collecting and evaluating all the data, which are then shown on the display. Introduction The measurement of various physiological parameters of the epidermis has been already the object of studies over 80 years ago [1]. A large number of works on solid wafer–based measurement techniques may be found in the literature, for example the use of a glucose watch was proposed [2]. Most of the described sensors never reached the market because of problems related to the robustness of the electrical contacts to the epidermis, miniaturization issues, and lack of full portability. Attributes like small size, lightweight, and biocompatibility are very hard to achieve in a single device. The most recent studies have been focusing on stretchable membranes, which may fulfill all the above-mentioned requirements (Fig. 1). Fig. 1 Electronic epidermal system [3] The field of electronic systems on flexible substrates has been emerging in recent years with the development of systems on foil for different functionalities such as circuits, displays and sensors. The latter include the development of sensors for temperature [4] or pressure [5]. The application range of flexible sensing systems for on-body applications range from pressure, temperature, humidity, strain, ECG sensors [3] to body movement. Our approach aims at developing a wireless mobile sensor platform consisting of the wireless stretchable tag placed on the skin/wound, which could communicate wirelessly with the mobile device. The system should be reliable and user friendly.