Fiber-based soft mechanical sensors for wearable and biomedical applications
Jaehong Lee
Soft Biomedical Devices Lab, Department of Robotics Engineering,
Daegu Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Daegu, South Korea
jaelee@dgist.ac.kr
Abstract
Electronic devices with stretchable and wearable features have been attracting a huge interest because of their potential applications in wearable electronics, electronic skins, biomedical engineering, and in-vivo bioelectronics. Among various types of soft and wearable electronic devices, textile electronics which combine conventional textiles and electronic devices is one of promising fields because clothes are essential at all times for all humans regardless of age or gender. However, conventional planar electronic devices have been limited to being woven into flexible textiles or integrated onto complex nonplanar substrates. Such limitation has hindered their use in textiles electronics or advanced wearable electronics. In this regard, stretchable and wearable electronic devices in fiber (1D) form, which can be directly integrated into daily clothes or textiles without any inconsistency are greatly promising for future wearable electronics. In addition, the fiber-based electronic devices can successfully overcome practical limitations (e.g. structural mismatching, suturability. etc.) of previous planar soft electronics in in-vivo applications.
In this talk, fiber-based (1D) soft pressure and strain sensors based on metallic nanomaterials, which can overcome the existing limitations of previous 2D electronic devices, are presented. The research starts with the development of stretchable conductive fibers with outstanding conductivity (>20,000 S/m), stretchability (>450%) and stability over 10,000 stretching cycles using metallic nanoparticles. Based on the conductive fibers, various fiber-based mechanical sensors such as pressure, strain, and multimodal sensors are fabricated for smart textile and wearable applications. In addition to their successful demonstrations in wearable applications, this research is also focusing on considering practical issues in current implantable electronics which is important for clinical applications but have been barely considered so far.
Short Bio
Jaehong Lee is currently working as an assistant professor in the Department of Robotics Engineering at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Republic of Korea. He received his B.S. (2011) and Ph.D. degree (2017) in electrical and electronic engineering from Yonsei University in Republic of Korea. He worked as an ETH postdoctoral research fellow (2018-2020) at the Laboratory of Biosensors & Bioelectronics (LBB) at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on one-dimensional soft electronics for wearable and in biomedical vivo applications. As one of earlier scientists in the field of fiber electronics, he has over 25 peer-reviewed papers with over 1750 citations, ~20 presentations with 9 invited presentations despite the short career in his research field.