Textile Electronics for Chemical Sensing

Caffè Scientifico di Fisica della Materia

  • Data: 11 dicembre 2015 dalle 16:00 alle 17:00

  • Luogo: Aula riunioni 1° piano, DIFA, viale Berti Pichat 6/2

Contatto di riferimento:

Partecipanti: Dr. Isacco Gualandi

A tremendous and growing interest is focused on the development of new wearable technology for physiological monitoring, in order to obtain a novel class of personalized point-of-care devices that could be integrated into the daily life of a patient in the form of wireless body sensors. A wearable sensor should
display suitable mechanical features (flexibility, light weight and stretch ability), washability, low power requirements and it should be comfortable when worn. So far most research efforts in this direction have been focused on the production of miniaturized wearable appliances based on relatively mature technologies such as motion tracking, bio-electrical signals analysis and temperature detection.

Another promising ability is the chemical sensing of bio-markers in body fluids without employing invasive and complicated sampling-laboratory analysis. Unfortunately at this time the sensing of bio-markers cannot be performed using well-known sensors, because they often require the implantation of electrodes and/or the use of a relative-bulky read-out electronics. An appealing solution to overcome these drawbacks is the monitoring of biomarkers in sweat through wearable devices that are embedded into a textile, in order to obtain a sensor which actually “disappears” inside the cloth.

The development of such chemical sensor will be discussed on 11th December during the scientific coffee of material physics.