A temporary tattoo that brings hospital care to the home

Please meet Jane.

She has a high-risk pregnancy

and at 24 weeks,

she's on bed rest at the hospital

being monitored for her
preterm contractions.

She doesn't look the happiest --

that in part because it requires
technicians and experts

to apply these clunky belts on her
to monitor her uterine contractions.

Another reason Jane is not so happy
is because she's worried,

in particular she's worried
about what happens

after her 10-day stay
on bed rest at the hospital.

What happens when she's home?

If she were to give birth this early
it would be devastating.

As an African-American woman,

she's twice as likely
to have a premature birth,

or to have a stillbirth.

So Jane basically has one of two options:

stay at the hospital on bedrest,

a prisoner to the technology
until she gives birth

and then spend the rest
of her life paying for the bill,

or head home after her 10-day stay
and hope for the best.

Neither of these two
options seems appealing.

As I began to think
about stories like this

and hear about stories like this,

I began to ask myself and imagine,

is there an alternative.

Is there a way that we could have
the benefits of high-fidelity monitoring

that we get with our trusted
partners in the hospital

while someone is at home
living their daily life?

With that in mind,

I encouraged people in my research group

to partner with some
clever material scientists

and all of came together and brainstormed,

and after a long process,

we came up with a vision --

an idea --

of a wearable system that perhaps
you could wear like a piece of jewelry,

or you could apply
to yourself like a band-aid.

And after many trials and tribulations
and years of endeavors,

we were able to come up with this
flexible electronic patch

that was manufactured
using the same processes

that they use to build computer chips,

except the electronics are transferred
from a semi-conductor [wafer]

onto a flexible material that can
interface with the human body.

These systems are about
the thickness of a human hair.

It can measure the types
of information that we want.

Things such as:

bodily movement,

bodily temperature,

electrical rhythms of the body

and so forth.

We can also engineer these systems

so that they can integrate energy sources

and can have wireless
transmission capabilities.

So as we began to build
these types of systems,

we began to test them on ourselves
in our research group,

but in addition,

we began to reach out to some of our
clinical partners in San Diego

and to test these on different patients
in different clinical conditions,

including moms-to-be like Jane.

Here is a picture of a pregnant woman
in labor at our university hosiptal

and being monitored for her uterine
contractions with the conventional belt.

In addition,

our flexible electronic patches are there.

This picture demonstrate wave forms
pertaining to the fetal heart rate,

where the red corresponds to what
was acquired with the conventional belt

and the blue corresponds to our estimates
using our flexible electronic systems

and our algorithms.

At this moment,

we gave ourselves a big mental high-five.

Some of the things that we had imagined
were beginning to come to fruition

and we were actually seeing this
in a clinical context.

But there was still a problem.

The problem was the way that we
manufactured these systems

was very inefficient,

had low yield

and was very error-prone.

In addition,

as we talked to some
of the nurses in the hospital,

they encouraged us to make sure

that our electronics worked
with typical medical adhesives

that are used in a hospital.

We had an epiphany and said,
"Wait a minute.

Rather than just making
them work with adhesives,

let's integrate them into adhesives,

and that could solve
our manufacturing problem.

This picture that you see here

is our ability to embed these censors
inside of a piece of Scotch tape

by simply peeling it off of a [wafer].

Ongoing work in our research group

allows us to in addition embed integrated
circuits into the flexible adhesives

to do things like amplifying signals
and digitizing them,

processing them

and encoding for wireless transmission.

All of this integrated

into the same medical adhesives
that are used in the hospital.

So when we reached this point,

we had some other challenges

from both an engineering as well as
a usability perspective

to make sure that we could
make it used practically.

In many digital health discussions,

people believe in the idea