CAREER: Solution‐based, Continuous Manufacturing of User‐friendly, On‐Skin Electronics for Customized Health‐Monitoring

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This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant supports the fundamental studies necessary to achieve solution-based, continuous manufacturing of user-friendly, on-skin electronics which can simultaneously record multiple desired human physiological signals (i.e., multimodal) for customized health-monitoring. Emerging on-skin wearable electronics can find broad applications in clinical healthcare, personalized fitness tracking, human-machine interfaces, and the internet of things, which are important to national prosperity and welfare. To unleash their full potential in real-world settings, next-generation on-skin wearables should be user-friendly (e.g., breathable, antibacterial, thermally regulatable), be low-cost and disposable to minimize infection risks, and be multimodal to provide a comprehensive picture of the body’s health. However, the field of flexible electronics lacks the knowledge necessary to achieve mass production of user-friendly, breathable on-skin wearable electronics. This project aims to meet this challenge through the study of slot-die-based scalable synthesis of multifunctional porous elastic substrates and high-throughput mask-free inkjet printing of multimodal bioelectronics on porous substrates. The proof-of-concept device generated in this project will perform concurrent measurements of multiple human biophysical and biochemical signals to aid in the early diagnosis of heart diseases and virus infections. The research plan is complemented by synergistic educational and outreach activities, including curriculum development, research training for graduate and undergraduate students, summer internships with industry, interactive exhibitions for the general public and summer camps for K-12 students.The goal of this research is to discover the processing-structure-property relationships in phase-separation-induced porous elastomers for their mass manufacture and to understand the interplay of inkjet-printed nanomaterial droplets with porous structures for high-quality bioelectronics printing. The three interrelated research objectives are to (i) uncover the solution-based synthesis of multifunctional user-friendly porous elastic substrates; (ii) study inkjet printing of model nanomaterials (silver nanowires and laser-induced graphene) on porous elastic substrates via simulations and experiments; and (iii) explore inkjet printing of nanomaterials-based, customized, multimodal bioelectronics on porous substrates. This project seeks answers to the following questions. (i) What are precise interpretable relationships of the processing conditions, porous structures, and properties of slot-die-coated, phase-separation-induced porous elastic substrates? (ii) How does surface integration of silicone nanofibrils on user-friendly porous substrates improve the uniformity, reproducibility and resolution of inkjet-printed nanomaterial patterns to enable high-quality mask-free printing of customized multimodal bioelectronics? In addition, surface-coated silicone nanofibrils can offer antibacterial capability due to their small diameters and irregular three-dimensional arrangements. This project can advance the key knowledge base of advanced manufacturing from both phase-separation-induced scalable synthesis of porous materials and solution-based high-throughput printing of multimodal bioelectronics on the porous substrates.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.