Skin-conformal, soft material-enabled bioelectronic system with minimized motion artifacts for reliable health and performance monitoring of athletes

Recent advances in biosensors, bioelectronics, and system integration allow the development of wristband-type devices for health and performance monitoring of athletes. Although these devices provide adequate sensing outputs, they suffer from signal loss due to improper contact of a rigid sensor with the skin. In addition, when a rubber band tightly secures the sensor to the skin, the gap between sensor and skin causes inevitable motion artifacts, resulting in corrupted data. Consequently, the rigidity and bulky form factor of the existing devices are not suitable for a practical use since athletes typically go through strenuous activities during training and matches. Here, we introduce a soft, wearable flexible hybrid electronics (WFHE) with integrated flexible sensors and circuits in an ultrathin, low-modulus elastomer. The thin-film bioelectronic system avoids the use of bulky, rigid sensors, while providing negligible mechanical and thermal burdens to the wearer. Enabling conformal contact between sensor and skin minimizes undesired motion artifacts. A set of computational and experimental studies of soft materials, flexible mechanics, and system packaging provides key fundamental design factors for a comfortable, reliable, waterproof bioelectronic system. Skin conformal WFHE with sparse signal reconstruction enables reliable, continuous monitoring of photoplethysmogram, heart rate, and activities of athletes. Development of a quantitative analysis between impact force and impact velocity extracted from motion acceleration provides an objective assessment of an athletic punching force. Collectively, this study shows the first demonstration of a wireless, soft, thin-film electronics for a real-time, reliable assessment of athletic health and performance.