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TOM SNYDER: Our overall focus is on wearable electronics
and we're trying to remove the battery from those electronics
so that when you're wearing a device, the device is always
powered by your body heat, it's powered by your body motion and
you can do things like vigilant health monitoring. You can
collect data and help people understand how to manage their
wellness. Here we have silver nanowires that have been
embedded in a material called PDMS. It's a stretchable
material. You see it stretches, it bends, it can be very
comfortable against the skin. This particular geometry is an
interdigitated electrode for hydration monitoring where if
you put this on the body, you connect it to some electronics
and it can be used to understand how much hydration is in the
body at different depths under the skin. This same material can
also be used in other applications. So this is a
silver nanowire embedded material in the pattern of an
antenna. A possible on body application of this would be to
put it say across a knuckle. If you want to understand how
someone is moving, based on how it stretches and changes, you
can do a strain measurement and understand say maybe for an
arthritic patient what their range of motion is. The research
that we're doing really breaks into four main focus areas. One
is energy harvesting. How do you use the body as a power supply
and if you've got good power supply you also need to match
that to the load so very low power electronics. So as an
example, this is a system on chip that's been developed at
the University of Virginia and with collaborators at University
of Michigan. And this chip can be used for electro-cardiogram
monitoring. Most people are familiar with Bluetooth low
energy. That's considered one of the leading low power standards.
This chip operates about a thousand times lower power than
Bluetooth low energy but it still can transmit three to five
meters. So low power electronics. And then sensors,
things that can do bioelectric sensing, biochemical sensing,
gas sensing, understanding your environment. And then the last
real research area for us is is this integration and form
factor. What does it mean to build something into a
stretchable material, something that you can just put through
the laundry and it still works. Things that can be used in
internet of things, applications that are other, maybe not health
related but applicable uses of these technologies in unique,
novel form factors. This shirt has got some screen printed
special ink that we've developed that can be screen printed onto
the shirt. It's very stretchable. In the screen
printed form, it's rigid but you can heat transfer it onto the
shirt. The green layer is just a protective coating so that the
shirt is launderable. It can go through numerous wash cycles and
still operate correctly. At the ends of this particular device
would be electrodes. So this is another prototype where we've
got electrodes that through on one side would contact to the
body. On the other side could contact to your electronics. And
those can be connected to this total system to create for
example, an electrocardiogram monitoring t-shirt. So NSF has
been fantastic, right. We could not have started this effort
without the seed funding, very large seed funding from the
National Science Foundation and it provides a great opportunity
to engage. When you first engage with a company, we need to be
able to get to the point where we can show the value of the
relationship and the research without immediately just saying,
before we do anything else, I need some money, right. So it
gives an opportunity for companies to realize we can
leverage this public support of research and then the companies
also financially contribute. It truly is a partnership but
without that kind of first step, this would be perhaps
a dream that would be very, very hard to really pull into
a real coalition.