Wearable nano-engineered systems : towards real-time health monitoring for remote places

In the coming years preventive medicine and medical treatment will strongly rely on wearable and implantable biomedical devices. Advances in manufacturing, energy harvesting systems, and information technologies are contributing to a transformation in the mobile health era in terms of healthcare management and real-time, personalised tracking of the health status. Thus, the demand of wearable devices for monitoring and treatment of chronic diseases such as diabetes in remote places is expected to drastically increase. Specifically, the design and development of next-generation wearable devices for the diabetes treatment involves multi-disciplinary fields such as transdermal drug delivery, radio-frequency energy harvesting, and embedded, low-power electronics. In this thesis, we present the integration of various concepts from these areas relevant for wearable healthcare technologies to progress towards wearable devices for monitoring and treatment of diabetic patients in remote places. First, our efforts have been focused on the design, simulation, and fabrication of planar, small and flexible antennas for both radio-frequency energy harvesting and wireless communication purposes, focusing on the unlicensed band of 2.45 GHz. Next, a novel painless patch design is presented as a transdermal insulin delivery system. The patch is based on the integration of nano-engineered heating elements - gold nanomesh thin layers - on polyimide substrates for transdermal insulin therapy by wireless, electrothermal actuation. A thin film of reduced graphene oxide integrated onto the nanoheater provides the drug reservoir. Numerical computations to analyse the Joule heating of the patch in contact with the human skin were performed. Finally, the architecture and the design of the wearable electronic system to control the electrothermal patch with a smart phone are described, considering that the transdermal patch is powered via batteries and radio-frequency energy harvesting.