Flexible a-Igzo Tft Technology for Wireless Nfc Compatible Healthcare Patches

With the advent of the internet of things, flexible wearable healthcare patches are gaining significant research interest, as they are unobtrusive, comfortable to wear, and can support continuous observation of physiological signals, helping to monitor wellness or diagnose diseases. Long-term monitoring is also an essential support for preventive healthcare. Wearable healthcare patches should be comfortable i.e. conformal, lightweight, thin, and cable-less. Hence, a healthcare patch should include sensors and their readout electronics and should provide communication functionality too. Amorphous Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (a-IGZO) Thin Film Transistors (TFTs) fabricated on flexible substrates are an attractive technology to build healthcare patches due to their flexibility, stretchability, conformability to the human body, lightweight, and low cost. This approach also enables monolithic integration of sensors and electrodes with the readout electronics, ensuring maximum user comfort. In this presentation, a state of the art flexible a-IGZO TFT technology will be presented, together with device characterization and a discussion of the design challenges related to healthcare patches design. Furthermore, a flexible ECG patch compatible with Near Field Communication (NFC) will be presented as an application example. The patch is capable to acquire ECG signals, amplify them keeping a standard-compliant SNR, CMRR, and input impedance, and convert them to a 105.9 kb/s Manchester-encoded serial bitstream which can be sent wirelessly to a smartphone via NFC for further post-processing.

Mohammad Zulqarnain 1, Stefano Stanzione 2, Steve Smout 3, Myriam Willigems 3, Kris Myny 3, Eugenio Cantatore 1 1 IC Group, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. 2Holst Centre / imec, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. 3imec, Leuven, Belgium.