Manufacturing of Low Cost Wearable Human Health Monitoring Devices

Wireless wearable devices can continuously assess and communicate the condition of patients and are crucial components of digital mobile health platforms. General societal trends across the globe, including a shortage of centralized laboratory and medical facilities, aging populations with increasing incidence of infectious and chronic diseases, earlier diagnosis of diseases, personalized medicine, companion testing for pharmaceutical use, government initiatives, and insurance acceptance, are all important factors behind the demand for reliable, low-cost, wireless, wearable health monitoring and medical devices. Fortunately, technological building blocks for the implementation of these devices have evolved to the point that we believe that such monitoring will progress into a fully mobile approach in the near future, enabling continuous monitoring across acute, ambulatory, and home care. In the past decade, a number of wireless physiological monitoring devices have been developed and tested in various clinical settings and a few of them are at the early stages of product release. Furthermore, in 2020, due to the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous wearable devices were investigated for early infection detection and patient monitoring in hospital and nursing home settings. In spite of this tremendous potential and significant investments by both device developers and government agencies, the broad adoption of wearable medical devices has not yet been fully realized. The barriers to broad adoption include device cost and performance challenges, ease of use, integration of devices within the remote care flow system as well as lack of robust reimbursement models. In this talk, we will discuss flexible hybrid electronics manufacturing opportunities and challenges to creating low-cost, high-performance wireless sensor systems for vital signs. We will highlight the critical needs and progress towards enabling the supply chains that allow for low-cost and sustainable manufacturing solutions scalable to large volumes.