Soft-Matter Engineering for Wearable Electronics

rogress in soft lithography and soft materials integration have led to extraordinary new classes of soft-matter sensors, circuits, and transducers. These material technologies are composed almost entirely out of soft matter – elastomers, gels, and conductive fluids like eutectic gallium-indium (EGaIn) – and represent the building blocks for wearable thin-film electronics that are soft, flexible, and stretchable. Because of their intrinsic compliance and elasticity, such electronics can adhere to skin or be incorporated into clothing and remain functional without impairing natural body motion. In this talk, I will review recent contributions from my research group in creating wearable soft electronics using these emerging practices in “soft-matter engineering.” In particular, I will focus on efforts for sensing, signal processing, energy storage, and energy harvesting using soft material composites, stretchable electronics, and embedded microelectronics. This will include particle-filled elastomers with unique sensing properties as well as EGaIn-based technologies for stretchable circuitry, batteries, and transducers. I will also explore applications of these systems for wearable physiological monitoring, activity tracking, and power generation. Much of this work has been inspired by past research, including pioneering work by members of the ASSIST ERC.

Carmel Majidi

Clarence H. Adamson Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University on January 21, 2021 at 1:00 PM in Zoom
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Carmel Majidi is the Clarence H. Adamson Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the Soft Machines Lab.

ASSIST is developing leading-edge systems for high-value applications such as healthcare and IoT by integrating fundamental advances in energy harvesting, low-power electronics, and sensors with a focus on usability and actionable data.