Reliability design on wearable device for initial osteoarthritis (OA) on knee joints

More than 750,000 females and 500,000 males in Taiwan will be diagnosed as osteoarthritis (OA) patient in 2018. Also, two thirds of orthopedics outpatients are found to be associated with OA. Therefore, it becomes necessary and essential to detect the severity of OA knee joints as early as possible and to release/reduce the knee pain induced by OA. In recent years, the wearable technology has become the fastest growing electronic technology because of size miniaturization, low power consumption, intelligence, and convenience features. There are two features of wearables, i.e. the space is limited and the substrate used should be flexible and stretchable. In this paper, an innovated wireless wearable apparatus has been developed to detect OA symptom. A chip embedded flexible PDMS substrate with ultrafine conduct lines and laser-drilled vias is required for this innovated wearable devices. The packaging technology developed in this work is to vertically/horizontally assemble ultra-thin heterogeneous ICs, sensors, passive components, interposer or flexible substrate into a single package. In addition, reliability test and evaluation are conducted to evaluate one-time maximum bending test and duration bending test. In this paper, “develop a packaging technique for smart wireless wearable devices for OA detection” and “develop test standards for smart wireless wearable apparatus” will be presented.