Frictionless wearable technology: The key to unleashing the power of wearable sensors for health and lyfestyle

The healthcare sector is on a path towards a much more preventative and personalized medicine. To manage disease, there will be analysis techniques that are orders of magnitude faster and less expensive than today's approaches and that cause minimal disruption of an out-patients activities. Semiconductor nanotechnology will be a key enabler to achieve this disruption. Small low-cost disposables featuring customized silicon chips will soon enable complex (bio)chemical tests so that in the near future anyone will be able to perform a range of tests anywhere and anytime. Apart from managing disease, an additional disruption will come from managing everyone's health by coaching them towards a healthy lifestyle and towards prevention. This will be done by wearable sensors, monitoring whether you live a healthy life, that assess your stress levels, your emotions and so on. The data generated by these wearable sensors will enable personalized coaching techniques to e.g. reduce stress or increase fitness. User acceptance, which has not been an issue in wearables for chronic disease monitoring of patients, is critical for the success of wearables for lifestyle. This puts very different requirements on the design of wearable systems: the wearable device and its app need to be frictionless, social, personalized and designed for engagement. This presentation will give an overview of application cases and emerging wearable solutions in the medical and lifestyle domain, as well as highlight the technological building blocks needed to enable these applications.