CHAPTER 02 Non-invasive Bioelectronics for Personal and Precision Health Care

Imagine having a long term condition such that you must take regular medication. Taking it is a substantial burden on you and the people who help care for you, particularly if you are elderly or suffering from cognitive impairment. What if the treatment could be released automatically, not on a predefined routine but by detecting when you actually need it? This is a powerful vision, but one which highlights the limitations of current technologies. Over the last decade exciting non-invasive sensing platforms such as the fitbit and Apple watch have enabled the capture of real-time health and lifestyle data. However, all current ‘wearables’ have two major limitations: • The manufacturing is based upon highly miniaturised, but essentially conventional, microelectronics mass produced in a Silicon foundry. As such there is limited scope for the personalisation of devices from a manufacturing point of view. It also means that current devices are held in place using straps, which do not maintain a good connection to the body over long periods and which introduce significant numbers of strap and motion artefacts into the collected signals. • Their focus has been on “Big Data” collection. Wearable sensors are now seen as “one-way streets” only for data generation. There is substantial potential for sensor systems which analyse the collected data ‘on-electrode’ and allow data driven personalisation of outputs. For example, monitoring physiological parameters and performing highly targeted treatment release within a few milliseconds of a trigger event, where there is not time to send the signals to a data centre for conventional analysis.