Wearable Organic Optoelectronic Sensors for Medicine

Abstract

There is a growing trend in medicine towards compact devices for monitoring and treatment. Such devices would ideally be flexible and wearable, thereby enabling ambulatory monitoring and treatment in which the patient can move around. Organic semiconductors have attractive properties for realizing this vision as they enable thin and flexible devices to be made. In this work we have discussed three examples of such applications. The first is the development of wearable light sources for skin cancer treatment. The second is a sensor using polymer LEDs and photodiodes to measure changes in tissue oxygenation. The third application is a muscle contraction sensor in which anisotropic scattering of light from a polymer LED is detected by polymer photodiodes and demonstrated the feasibility of this sensor for prosthetic control by actuating a robotic arm using the signal detected from a volunteer’s arm. These results provide interesting directions for polymer optoelectronics, and the possibility of measuring a range of important biomedical processes.