Design-For-Manufacturing Techniques For Print Electronics Technology With Emphasis On Disposable Wearable Personal Health Monitors

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The need for low-cost health care requires patients to play an active role in their own health care outside traditional hospitals and other government-run institutions using personalized health management systems. Such management systems will be built on low-cost consumer devices such as laptops, smart tablets and phones, together with low-cost wearable sensor technologies. The smart devices provide a portable monitoring system with significant processing capability with wireless connections to world-wide-web cloud services. As the number of smart devices sold in the past decade is in excess of 2/5th of the entire world’s population, the bottleneck to a low-cost health network for all lies between the smart device and the individual person. It is therefore our intention with this research aim to focus on the “last decimeter” between the individual and the smart device using low-cost electronics, MEMS and microfluidic technologies. This aim will see our attention initially focused on the development of a wearable sensor platform with a disposable front-end that can be manufactured in high volume and low-cost. Disposable medical materials play a large part in many health care protocols involving body fluids or substances. While a popular approach for providing wearable health monitors is to include CMOS-based silicon implementations, however, since the goal is to produce a single-use sensor, this approach would not be cost-effective. Instead, this work will consider the application of printed electronics (PE) that uses low-cost semiconductor, conductive and dielectric inks that can be dispensed using sheet-based or roll-to-roll print methods, similar to those used to print newspapers and other graphic displays. Moreover, this project will consider new manufacturing techniques to establish PE as a low-cost, high-throughput manufacturing method for disposable health care use. This project will involve at least seven graduate students (4 Ph.D and 3 M. Eng. students) and five undergraduate students over the duration of this project. Graduate students will receive training through courses, industry interaction, and mentoring on thesis research. In the near term, this project will focus its efforts on the sensory solution to the general problem of urinary incontinence and, in particular, the problem of nocturnal enuresis, which is the accidental or unwanted leakage of urine at night. Incontinence is a prevalent health condition that is rarely discussed, as people living with the condition are often embarrassed to discuss it with their healthcare providers. The World Health Organization calls incontinence “one of the last medical taboos”. However, some estimates indicate that as many as 3.3 million Canadians experience some form of incontinence. The number of people experiencing incontinence will rise dramatically over the coming years due to the aging "boomer" population.