Wearable Photonic Sensors in Flexible and Stretchable Form Factor

Medical device industry is a rapidly growing opportunity area for photonics technologies, with applications ranging from diagnostics to surgical tools and therapeutics. Real-time monitoring of vital parameters with unobtrusive wearable devices can minimize the time of patients in hospital and ultimately the technologies can enable a paradigm change from treatment-based healthcare towards preventive and participatory medicine. For example, optical monitoring of hearth rate, blood pressure, physical activity and other parameters can minimize risk for post-treatment complications and subsequent treatment costs and enhance the quality of life. Besides healthcare, in wellness applications wearable devices help citizens to better track, for example, the stress levels and thus optimize the amount and level of exercises. A key issue in the production of wearable devices with the maximized user comfortability, is the manufacturing process capable for assembling and integrating devices in flexible and stretchable form factors. At high volumes this can be made using multiple roll-to-roll fabrication processes covering printing of electrical wiring and stop&go component assembly. As an outcome the wearable photonic monitoring devices can be highly sophisticated acquiring multimodal data or low-cost plaster-type devices intended for a short term usage.