Bio

Dr. Zheng Yan is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical, Biological and Chemical Engineering, and the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He was previously a postdoc researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. degree from Rice University. His current research interests center on the design and scalable fabrication of novel on-skin wearable biomedical devices with unprecedented properties. Thus far, he has published 62 papers in leading journals with more than 9500 citations and his h-index is 42.

Abstract

Pencil-Paper-Based Wearable Bioelectronics

As compared to conventional, rigid, bulky physiological monitoring tools, emerging onskin wearable biomedical devices are ultrathin, lightweight, and small footprint and can find wide applications in point of care diagnostics because of their easy deployment outside the hospital settings. At present, on-skin wearables are usually fabricated by patterning conventional inorganic materials, novel organic materials, or emerging nanomaterials on continuous (i.e., non-porous) flexible supporting substrates. Consequently, the state-of-the-art on-skin wearables often suffer from expensive precursor materials, costly fabrication facilities, complex fabrication processes, and limited functionalities and disposability. By using widely accessible pencils and papers as the fabrication tools, we have developed a rich variety of cost-effective and disposable on-skin bioelectronic devices, ranging from biophysical sensors and sweat biochemical sensors to thermal stimulators, humidity energy harvesters, and transdermal drug delivery systems. The enabled devices can find wide applications in point of care diagnostics, particularly in low-resource environments owing to their low-cost resources, handy operation, time-saving fabrication, and abundant potential designs.