Nowadays healthcare system faces several major challenges such as centralizing, slow and invasive, which causes healthcare expensive, time consuming and even diagnosis/delay of treatment. One of the reason is that the current biomedical equipment are heavy, bulky and irritating. This is because all established classes of high-performance electronics exploit bulky rigid inorganic materials, such as silicon. However, the human body is soft and curvilinear. This mismatch in properties hinders the development of devices capable of intimate, conformal integration with biological tissues, for applications ranging from measurement of bio-signals to delivery of therapies and establishment of human-machine interfaces.

Future healthcare electronics should be soft, flexible, and wireless, thus can be a great solution for the currently existing problems. Under the umbrella of the biomedical engineering, solid state physics, chemistry, electronics, and mechanics, our group aims to develop novel soft bio-integrated electronics that can precisely collection clinical quality data, by engineering the device design strategies, materials processing methods, fabrication techniques and electrical measurements. There are three specific areas we are working on currently:

• Functional soft materials. We develop high performance materials for flexible electronics and MEMS, from semiconductors, to conductors, to dielectrics, and to piezoelectrics.

• Skin-integrated electronics. Skin is the largest organ of human body, which is response for connection our body to environments. We develop soft skin-integrated electronics, also known as “epidermal electronics” for monitoring our health information, such as temperature, activity, ECG etc.

• Novel medical tools. Diagnosis of diseases highly depend on medical instrument and tools. Due to the soft and time dynamic nature of human tissues (organs), the resolution and accuracy of the current medical tests are still facing challenge. We build the bridge between flexible electronics and human tissues, targeting on future medical tools.