Research at UAB underway on wearables that are thin and durable

A researcher at University of Alabama Birmingham has developed a wearable sensor for healthcare and robotics. His approach uses ultra-thin sensor material that could potentially make stethoscopes unnecessary.

With an ultra-sensitive, ultra-thin wearable sensor, a patient’s tiny acoustic signals from the heart or lungs would be transmitted to a device to be read.  Existing wearable devices to discover acoustic signals are not ideal for long-term monitoring.

Researcher Chengyi Xu, an assistant professor in engineering, said a sensitive acoustic sensor would help detect heart and lung sounds that are abnormal, and over a long period of time. 

“Today, patients typically need to visit a clinic, where physicians use a stethoscope to listen for subtle abnormalities in these weak acoustic signals,” he said. “That approach provides only brief snapshots and cannot continuously track disease onset, progression or recovery with high precision. And it depends heavily on the clinician’s experience and hearing ability, which can vary substantially.”

The best performing wearables will be ultrathin, like a second skin, so patients wear them comfortably for a long time.  Xu and collaborators are working on a base material that is made of a thin ribbon network made of molybdenum disulfide. Each ribbon is just 2 to 5 microns wide, compared to a human hair of 100 microns.

The team wants to validate the new material in a dynamic sensing application in a proof of concept. 

“Already we are seeing that our single-ribbon layer network on a soft substrate shows very good sensitivity under small mechanical strain and it outperforms other state of the art materials,” Xu said. “That opens the door to a new generation of skin-like imperceptible electronics that could one day listen to the body respond to the environment and merge sensing into our everyday lives.”

The research was first published in Science Advances.