Multimodal Flexible Sensor Sheet for Remote Healthcare Application

Personal healthcare is now important application to understand the conditions and also monitor abnormal change of vital at home. In fact, a variety of wearable devices have been commercially available. However, due to design conflicts, most of the wearable devices allow to detect only heart rate and activity automatically. For the future healthcare and telemedicine applications, more continuous and real-time vital signals are most likely required to diagnose the symptoms or change of vitals. To collect more vital data from skin surface, conformal contact to the skin without sacrificing comfortability is important, which conventional inflexible sensor is difficult to monitor. To address the challenge, very thin flexible and/or stretchable multimodal sensor sheets are interesting to apply this application. As the one of the potential materials and methods, in this talk, multimodal flexible sensors for the healthcare applications are introduced. In addition to the flexible sensors, wireless system and signal processing for the feedback alarm function when the abnormal signal is detected are discussed. In particular, electrocardiogram (ECG), skin temperature, and skin humidity flexible sensors and their integration on a flexible film are explained by using fundamental characteristics.<br/>This study focuses on the multimodal flexible sensors for the application of remote healthcare applications. Although additional functional sensors and systems to realize more useful and convenient home-use healthcare system is required, the approaches may contribute the further developments to open a next class of electronics and robotics.