“Wear and Forget” patch for ambient assisted living

Rising cumulative costs of public hospital stay and its impact on government spending and the economy over the years has necessitated the adoption of other options of administering medical care such as home care, care homes and e-health [1] . The possibility of not having a health care personnel physically present in some of these scenarios created a need for remote patient monitoring. This has impacted positively on the development of new technologies for patient monitoring, personalised care, and assisted living especially as the world population age over the next few decades. These devices include hand-held/pocket-sized activity monitors, wearable patches [2] , wristbands [3] , [4] , watches. While these devices are functional and are potentially cheaper when compared with in-hospital care, they have not been widely adopted for several reasons such as intrusiveness – some of them are rigid and inconvenient to be carried around by patients without substantial change to their everyday lives. Another reason is invasiveness – some devices sample patient blood repeatedly. In this work, we present a non-intrusive (“wear and forget”) patch platform for patient monitoring. This device, fabricated on a flexible polyimide substrate, is light, flexible and conformable to the human body, has a longer range of detection because of integrated flexible battery and supercapacitor, and transfers data collected from patient wirelessly to an RFID reader located nearby, providing opportunity for both ambient and remote monitoring [2] , as well as personalised e-health assistance and continuous monitoring, which enables early detection of declining health [5] .