Small wearable or implantable electronics could help monitor our health, diagnose diseases, and provide opportunities for improved, autonomous treatments.
Small wearable or implantable electronics could help monitor our health, diagnose diseases, and provide opportunities for improved, autonomous treatments. But to do this without aggravating or damaging the cells around them, these electronics will need to not only bend and stretch with our tissues as they move, but also be soft enough that they will not scratch and damage tissues.
Researchers at Stanford have been working on skin-like, stretchable electronic devices for over a decade. In a paper published March 13 in Nature, they present a new design and fabrication process for skin-like integrated circuits that are five times smaller and operate at one thousand times higher speeds than earlier versions. The researchers demonstrated that their soft integrated circuits are now able to drive a micro-LED screen and detect a braille array that is more sensitive than human fingertips.
“We’ve made a significant leap forward. For the first time, stretchable integrated circuits are now small enough and fast enough for many applications,” said Zhenan Bao, a K. K. Lee Professor in Chemical Engineering at Stanford and senior author on the paper. “We hope that this can make wearable sensors and implantable neural and gut probes more sensitive, operate more sensors, and potentially consume less power.”
Read more at: Stanford University
Intrinsically stretchable transistors and integrated circuits under large deformation after being released from the supporting substrate. (Photo Credit: Donglai Zhong, Jiancheng Lai and Yuya Nishio of Bao Group in Stanford University)
