COVID-19: Fabrication of autonomous flexible hybrid electronic devices for patient-monitoring

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Our industrial partners have a preliminary design and beta-prototype for an entirely novel monitoring device. This monitoring patch consists of a fully-autonomous and wireless flexible hybrid electronic circuit providing real-time measurements of vital signs. It can remotely provide temperature, ECG and oximetry measurements, hence revealing early signs of fever, arrhytmia, respiratory distress and blood pressure connected with COVID-19 infection using cloud-computing AI algorithms. This next-generation of advanced health-monitoring devices could provide a tremendous help in the context of the current pandemic situation by (1) protecting healthcare workers by detecting the first signs of fatigue and/or infection, (2) alleviating the burden on the healthcare workers with a tool for real-time patient monitoring with automated alerts when their situation changes and (3) providing a screening solution for patients showing-up at the clinic with early signs of infection. Given a patch, they can go back home and receive an alert message if their situation evolves, with an emergency number to reach a healthcare professional and discuss changes to their health situation and the need to go to the hospital and/or clinic. In this project, our long-time industrial partners need our unique expertise in flexible hybrid electronic fabrication and integration using the pilot-line facilities at C2MI (Bromont, QC). The research objective will be: (1) to exploit our unique expertise in digitally-printed electronics and pilot-ready component assembly and integration, in order to (2) print a high-precision temperature-sensing device and circuitry on the flexible substrate to provide more accurate temperature measurements and (3) integrate a new more performant and rechargeable polymer-based battery module in order to increase device accuracy, increase lifetime and reduce costs. These first units will then be sent-out by the industrial partner to experts in order to rapidly obtain a Class-II certification in order to help the current situation. After the pandemic, it is clear that this device will also provide a tremendous help for many other patient monitoring or workers protection applications.