Washington: Electronics like skin joined with artificial intelligence It is being developed by researchers to detect potential emerging health concerns. The study was published in the journal Matter under the title “Intrinsically Stretchable Neuromorphic Devices for On-Body Processing of Health Data with Artificial Intelligence.”
Although flexible, wearable electronics are becoming increasingly common, they have yet to realize their full potential. Precision medical sensors placed on the skin to perform health monitoring and diagnostics may be possible with this technology in the near future. It would be like having an advanced medical facility at your disposal at all times.
The skin-like device is being developed in a project between the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME). The project is led by Sihong Wang, assistant professor at UChicago PME, with a joint appointment in Argonne’s Department of Nanoscience and Technology.
Worn on a regular basis, future wearable electronics could potentially find potential upside health problems such as heart disease, cancer or multiple sclerosis even before obvious symptoms appear. The device can also perform personalized analysis of tracked health data, reducing its need for wireless transmission. “Diagnostics for the same health measurement may differ depending on a person’s age, medical history and other factors,” Wang said. “Such diagnoses, along with health information collected continuously over extended periods, are very data intensive.”
Such a device would need to collect and process vast amounts of data, which even the best smartwatches today can do. And it has to do this data crunching in very little space with very little power consumption. To address that need, the team called upon neuromorphic computing. This AI technology mimics brain operations by training on past data sets and learning from experience. Its advantages include compatibility with stretchable materials, low energy consumption, and faster speeds than other types of AI.
Another major challenge the team faced was integrating electronics into a stretchable material such as skin. A key material in any electronic device is a semiconductor. In current ruggedized electronics used in cell phones and computers, this is usually a solid silicon chip. Stretchable electronics require that semiconductors be highly flexible materials that are still able to conduct electricity.
The team’s skin-like neuromorphic “chip” consists of a thin film of plastic semiconductor attached to stretchable gold nanowire electrodes. Even when stretched to twice its normal size, their device performed as planned without any cracks forming.
For one test, the team built an AI device and trained it to distinguish healthy electrocardiogram (ECG) signals from four different signals that indicate health problems. After training, the device was more than 95 percent effective at correctly identifying ECG signals.
The plastic semiconductor was also analyzed at beamline 8-ID-E at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne. Exposure to intense X-ray beams revealed how the molecules that make up the skin-like device material rearranged upon doubling in length. These results provided molecular-level information to better understand physical properties.
“A planned upgrade of the APS will increase the brightness of its X-ray beam by a factor of 500,” said argon physicist Joe Strzalka. “We look forward to studying the device’s material under its regular operating conditions, interacting with charged particles and changing the electrical potential in its environment. Instead of a snapshot, we will have more of a movie of the material’s structural response at the molecular level.” Higher beamline brightness and better detectors will make it possible to measure how much material softens or hardens in response to environmental influences.
“Although further development is still needed on several fronts, our device could one day be a game changer in that everyone can more effectively and frequently monitor their health status,” added Wang.
