This section must be of suitable quality to enable direct publication by the Agency. This report should address a wide audience, including the general public. It shall cover the results and the conclusions of the project as well as its socioeconomic impact, if any.
The need to control health care costs associated with chronic disease management has brought forward the possibility of using wearable medical devices as a solution. Optical sensing is at the heart of the recent uptake of mobile vital sign monitoring devices. Currently, there are optical sensors on the market that, aside from being comfortable and easy to wear, provide non-invasive monitoring of vital signs such as heart rate and blood oxygen saturation. The different sensors measure mostly one and sometimes two vital signs. There is clearly a large need for an all-in-one device that provides a more complete and reliable picture of our current wellness status.
The GraphHealth proof of concept project focused on the development of non-invasive health monitors based on broadband hybrid graphene quantum dot light detectors that can reliably measure many different vital signs. During the project we non-invasively measured heart rate, breathing rate and blood oxygen saturation and we are targeting to measure many other health parameters such as UV exposure, skin hydration and muscle oxygenation. Using the unique graphene/ quantum dot sensing technology we realized electronic-tattoo type devices that provide a conformal contact between the detector and the skin to reduce motion artefacts and thereby increase the reliability of the measurement. A major step forward towards manufacturability was the successful combination of flexible graphene/quantum dot sensors and high performance conventional read-out electronics and light sources.
On account of the results obtained in the project, contacts have been made with several major integrators, with end-users, as well as several of the major solution providers in the targeted fields. Moreover, new potential market segments within the wearables’ sector have been identified and targeted. Present efforts are aimed at further developing the technology in a direction that is aligned with these new markets (exploiting flexibility, transparency, small form factor, potential low price, etc.) while moving toward more product-oriented demonstrations: life-time, robustness and repeatability.
