All-printed wearable artificial synapses for stress response investigation
Abstract
Stress affects all biological systems in the body and has a significant impact on the abilities of Army warfighters to perform the mission. Understanding the stress response would be extremely useful for the self-management of mental and physical health and for improving human performance of the warfighters. Monitoring the biochemicals in body fluids long with vital signs under stress will facilitate the understanding the physiology of the stress response of the human body. Key potential biomarkers for stress assessment are highly likely to reside in a poorly explored yet easily obtainable body fluid: sweat. In this regard, the development of wearable bioelectronics capable of non-invasively monitoring biomarker data on the skin from the physiological to molecular level is highly desired. On the other side, although the large sets of data generated from wearable bioelectronics can play an important role in personalized healthcare and human performance monitoring, highly specialized human and computing resources are usually required to properly handle the monitored data. The emerging wearable technologies that have both powerful bioelectronic sensing and neuromorphic computing capabilities could serve as an attractive solution. To address these fundamental questions and realize on-skin real-time stress monitoring, we propose a fully printed bioelectronic synaptic system with neuromorphic computing capabilities that could continuously collect and process physicochemical biomarker signals on the skin and decode the links between the biomarker and stress levels. The flexible bioelectronic devices that could sense physical (i.e., heart rate and core body temperature) and molecular (i.e., glucose, lactate, and electrolytes) information from the human body via printed artificial synapses. A low-temperature mass-producible inkjet printing technology using custom-developed nanomaterial inks will be utilized to construct the skin-interfaced neuromorphic system for in situ data collection, processing, and computing. The wearable device will be evaluated in human trials to investigate the dynamic physiological profiles in stress response and decode the link between stress and physiological characteristics to build a continuous and reliable stress scale. Finally, the printed neuromorphic devices and bioelectronic synapses will be integrated into a flexible bioelectronic artificial neuron network to collect and process multimodal biomarker data toward stress classification and human performance monitoring.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 01, 2023
- Source ID
- W911NF2310041
Entities
People
- Wei Gao
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- California Institute of Technology
- United States Army