Printed hybrid arrays for health monitoring

Printing is a promising approach to fabricate a wide variety of devices, with much of the current focus on flexible smart labels, wearables, health monitoring, sensors and displays. These applications typically integrate various types of sensor materials and often include silicon integrated circuits (IC) for computation and wireless communications. Drop-on-demand printing in particular provides a simple route to side-by-side deposition of different chemo-responsive materials, enabling the fabrication of arrays of sensors to improve sensitivity and selectivity and for the detection of multiple analytes on a single device. Printed organic thin film transistors (TFT) provide logic and other circuit functions, but have performance and yield limitations that must be accommodated by the sensor circuit design. The sensor technology, ICs and other circuit elements need to be chosen carefully to integrate with the TFTs and match the functional and performance requirements of the application. This talk describes examples from various health monitoring sensor systems illustrating strategies for TFT circuit and sensor design.