UC Irvine

Continuous health monitoring is of great interest in the medical field because of its potential to improve diagnostics and treatments for patients. Continuous monitoring systems must be comfortable for the patients to wear as well as be able to gather actionable and high-quality data. This usually requires the device to be soft to maintain patient comfort as well as conformal to create a stable interface for high quality signals acquisition. While the last couple of decades has seen an exponential growth in wearable technology and global connectivity, the growth of soft, wearable electronics has been slower. The work presented here focuses on creating a soft, wearable system for monitoring human vital signs. Specifically, simpler fabrication schemes were created for fluidic systems and integrating conventional surface mounted devices (SMD) with stretchable electronics. Finally, a method is presented for measuring vital signs from the respiratory system using highly soft, conformal, and non-obtrusive strain sensors.