Development of Wearable Sensor That Causes No Skin Trouble Even After One Week of Use

Professor Cho Young-ho's KAIST Team Develops Porous Hair Cell Structure Macpa Sensor with Breakthrough Performance Improvement

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] A Korean research team has developed wearable sensor technology that causes no skin troubles even after wearing it for more than a week and has much better performance.

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced on the 17th that Professor Young-Ho Cho's research team from the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering developed a porous haircell-structured pulse wave (wave generated by heartbeat) sensor that transmits sweat generated from the skin in real time and dramatically improves the contact area with the skin.

Existing polymer-based pulse wave sensors have a sweat permeability lower than the average daily sweat production of the skin (432g/m2), which causes skin problems such as contact dermatitis and itching when attached for a long time. There is also a problem that the accuracy of the pulse wave signal decreases due to the low contact area that can stably contact the skin.

Professor Cho's team increased the sweat permeability of the pulse wave sensor by crystallizing citric acid inside the polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer and then dissolving it with ethanol to form small and uniform pores. They fabricated a porous haircell-structured pulse wave sensor that forms a haircell structure on the surface of this porous polymer to dramatically increase the contact area with the skin and improve the measurement accuracy of the pulse wave sensor.

The sweat permeability of this pulse wave sensor is 486g/m2 per day, which is higher than the average daily sweat production of the skin, increasing by 72% compared to existing technology. It was proven through a continuous attachment experiment for 7 days that no skin troubles occur even when attached to the skin for a long time. The measurement accuracy showed 22.89, improving the measurement accuracy about 9 times compared to existing technology.

Professor Cho said, "Through this research, we developed a wearable sensor that can continuously monitor human health status without skin troubles, and also established continuous usability as artificial skin."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.