Surveying the future of wearable sensor technology

Human skin is a remarkably sensitive organ that can register stimuli such as temperature, moisture, and pressure, which helps us understand and react to our surroundings. Inspired by this, scientists have developed skin-like wearable sensors that enable the monitoring of a variety of biomarkers, from body temperature and heart rate to breathing and joint movement. The advent of wearable sensor technology has opened consequential new ways to track health.

Wu et al. provided an in-depth exploration of recent advancements in multimodal wearable sensors. They outlined various applications for the sensors, as well as challenges to improving their efficacy, such as decoupling targeted physical stimuli from unintended ones.

“Our review focuses on how these sensors turn body signals into electric signals, which can then be measured to monitor health or diagnose diseases,” said author Shuhua Peng. “One major challenge is that these sensors sometimes respond to more than one type of stimulus, like heat and pressure, which can make their readings less accurate.”

The authors explored new solutions being implemented to address the problem of decoupling, such as the use of single-purpose sensors for each type of stimulus. They also discussed an array of other developments in wearable sensor technology and prospects for improving body signal detection, including the integration of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

“We hope our work inspires new ideas to make health monitoring easier and more reliable,” said Peng. “Like the human skin that inspires them, these sensors really could help how we interact with our environment.”

Source: “Recent advances in multimodal skin-like wearable sensors,” by Shuying Wu, Zhao Sha, Liao Wu, Hoang-Phuong Phan, Shuai He, Jianbo Tang, Jiangtao Xu, Dewei Chu, Chun H Wang, and Shuhua Peng, Applied Physics Reviews (2024). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0217328 .