Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME)
have developed a flexible, stretchable computing chip that processes information by mimicking
the human brain.
The device, described in the journal Matter, aims to change the way health data is processed.
It’s a brainy Band-Aid, a smart watch without the watch, and a leap forward for wearable
health technologies.
The researcher says that with this work they have bridged wearable technology with artificial
intelligence and machine learning to create a powerful device which can analyze health
data right on our own bodies.
Today, getting an in-depth profile about our health requires a visit to a hospital or clinic.
In the future, people’s health could be tracked continuously by wearable electronics
that can detect disease even before symptoms appear.
Unobtrusive, wearable computing devices are one step toward making this vision a reality.
The future of healthcare that the researchers envision includes wearable biosensors to track
complex indicators of health including levels of oxygen, sugar, metabolites and immune molecules
in people’s blood.
One of the keys to making these sensors feasible is their ability to conform to the skin.
As such skin-like wearable biosensors emerge and begin collecting more and more information
in real-time, the analysis becomes exponentially more complex.
A single piece of data must be put into the broader perspective of a patient’s history
and other health parameters.
Today’s smart phones are not capable of the kind of complex analysis required to learn
a patient’s baseline health measurements and pick out important signals of disease.
However, cutting-edge artificial intelligence platforms that integrate machine learning
to identify patterns in extremely complex datasets can do a better job.
But sending information from a device to a centralized AI location is not ideal.
Sending health data wirelessly is slow and presents a number of privacy concerns.
It is also incredibly energy inefficient.
The research team set out to design a chip that could collect data from multiple biosensors
and draw conclusions about a person’s health using cutting-edge machine learning approaches.
Importantly, they wanted it to be wearable on the body and integrate seamlessly with
skin.
The researchers turned to polymers, which can be used to build semiconductors and electrochemical
transistors but also have the ability to stretch and bend.
They assembled polymers into a device that allowed the artificial-intelligence-based
analysis of health data.
Rather than work like a typical computer, the chip— called a neuromorphic computing
chip—functions more like a human brain, able to both store and analyze data in an
integrated way.
To test the utility of their new device, the research team used it to analyze electrocardiogram
(ECG) data representing the electrical activity of the human heart.
They trained the device to classify ECGs into five categories—healthy or four types of
abnormal signals.
Then, they tested it on new ECGs.
Whether or not the chip was stretched or bent, they showed, it could accurately classify
the heartbeats.
More work is needed to test the power of the device in deducing patterns of health and
disease.
But eventually, it could be used either to send patients or clinicians alerts, or to
automatically tweak medications.