Bio-Integrated Wearable Devices: From Materials Engineering to Epidermal Sensors
Date: Wed, February 13, 2019
Time: 4:30pm - 5:45pm
Location: Holmes Hall 248
Speaker: Tyler Ray, Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering, University of Hawaii
University of Hawaii Department of Mechanical Engineering ME 691 Seminar Series
Recent advances in materials and mechanics establish novel classes of wearable devices that intimately couple to the soft, curvilinear surfaces of the epidermis. These thin, ‘skin-like’ devices, nearly physically imperceptible when worn, represent a paradigm shift for obtaining continuous, clinically-relevant physiological data. Although these devices offer significant potential for personalized medicine applications, limitations in materials, sensing methods, and energy storage impede continued progress. Breakthroughs in nanoscale materials (e.g. sensors, high energy storage materials) offer possible solutions; however, the scalable fabrication and integration of these materials remains an open challenge. This talk focuses on a class of soft, bio-integrated devices for clinical diagnostics illustrated through two application targets: (1) skin mounted, ‘epidermal’ shunt failure monitors for hydrocephalus patients and (2) epidermal microfluidic devices (‘epifluidics’) for the capture, storage, and biomarker analysis of sweat. This talk will also introduce a ‘material agnostic’ printing platform as a potential pathway to the scalable assembly of bulk, engineered hierarchical materials from nanoscale components. Discussions of theoretical and experimental results will demonstrate the use of acoustic microfluidic print nozzles as a pathway to control assembly of both microscale and nanoscale components in printed composites — critical for the continued advance of wearable diagnostic devices.
About the Speaker: Prof. Tyler Ray recently joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa having finished a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Rogers Research Group in both the Department of Materials Science & Engineering and the Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics in the Simpson Querrey Institute at Northwestern University. Prior to joining the Rogers Group, Dr. Ray finished postdoctoral training with Prof. Matthew Begley in the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) where he remains a visiting professor. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at UCSB in 2015 and both a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of South Carolina. Motivated by an interest in harnessing nanoscale material properties in composite materials, his current research centers on developing flexible, thin, and conformal epidermal platforms for clinical diagnostics.