Wearable health monitoring devices is the latest craze hitting the market, with consumers (and the NSA) wanting to track every aspect of their lives to learn more about their health, and maybe even put in the effort to improve it. True innovation within this field is dependent on being able to use sensors to track various health parameters, and to do so in an unintrusive but accurate way. Researchers from North Carolina State University may be onto something with their new silver nanowire sensors that are small and flexible enough to be easily attachable to human skin for long term use.
The sensors are able to track strain, pressure, detect a touch of a finger, and even detect ECG signals, all simultaneously so that one sensor can do the work of many. The engineering team behind the project envisions some of the earlier uses of the technology to include sensors that measure electrical muscle activity of amputees to control prosthetic devices in a more accurate fashion.
The reported sensors utilize the capacitive sensing mechanism, where silver nanowires are used as electrodes (conductors) and Ecoflex is used as a dielectric. The silver nanowire electrodes are screen printed. Our sensors have been demonstrated for several wearable applications including monitoring thumb movement, sensing the strain of the knee joint in patellar reflex (knee-jerk) and other human motions such as walking, running and jumping from squatting, illustrating the potential utilities of such sensors in robotic systems, prosthetics, healthcare and flexible touch panels.
Paper in journal Nanoscale: Wearable multifunctional sensors using printed stretchable conductors made of silver nanowires…
NC State press release: Silver Nanowire Sensors Hold Promise for Prosthetics, Robotics…