Soft material-enabled flexible electronics for disease diagnostics, therapeutics, and healthcare

Abstract

The United States healthcare costs are approaching half a trillion dollars annually while mortality rates continue to rise from neurodegenerative and systemic diseases. Preemptive and therapeutics care is an alternative to expensive surgeries in order to reduce costs. Popularity with wearable devices enables in vivo biosensing platforms, but the existing devices are heavy, rigid, and bulky which inherently disrupts high-quality data recording and causes discomfort. This thesis optimizes the mechanics and materials for a soft material platform integrated with open-mesh, serpentine structures for extreme flexibility and stretchability. Mechanical integration of these sensors and devices is enabled by printing techniques using photolithography and aerosol jet printing. Ultimately these sensors need to be comfortable for long term wear but it also needs to be thin for Virtual Reality applications involving ocular therapy. My therapeutic platform aims to improve quality of eye vergence movements with practice in a virtual reality display. The wearable “skin-like” electrodes enhance the recording and classification of ocular signals to control a wheelchair for Parkinson disease patients. Additionally, a similar platform enables us to record contrasting eye vergence motions with a virtual reality headset for home-based visual therapy due the sensor’s small form factor. In this thesis, a set of materials, mechanics, and system integration methods is presented and discussed to unite preemptive and therapeutic care for comfortable recordings using electrooculograms and wearable devices.