There is a growing demand for flexible, ultrasensitive wearable sensors for disease prognosis, monitoring, rehabilitation, and personalized health monitoring applications. In particular, human movement and physiological function monitoring devices are emerging to be the most sought-after wearable devices. They can potentially provide a host of valuable information regarding the health and well-being of an individual to facilitate healthy ageing. Many potential application like early diagnosis, prognostication of disease and/or decline in functional capacity, to detect health care problems, for monitoring the effect of interventions (e.g., medication, life-style risk factors, exercise) and for prediction of disease state. They offer new opportunities for clinicians to complement standard clinical assessments.

In this proposal, we propose cutting-edge transparent and degradable wearable tattoo patch sensor technologies using advanced aerosol jet printing. We address two specific societal challenging cases; 1) emotional health (stress) monitoring by sweat/cortisol sensing and 2) bruxism and facial palsy monitoring using muscle activity sensing.

These wearable miniature patch sensor technologies facilitate firstly continuous, remote monitoring of emotional health (stress) through tattooable sweat sensors, and secondly track bruxism and facial palsy with skin tattoo sensors that measure electromyography (EMG, muscle activity) signals. In addition, all the current standard-of-care monitoring technologies for cortisol sensing, facial palsy and bruxism are expensive, bulky and need to be conducted under the supervision of a trained clinical staff in a hospital/diagnostic laboratory environment. The proposed wearables allow home-based continuous monitoring of stress hormone cortisol in sweat and symptoms of bruxism and facial palsy via continuous recording of EMG signals.