Medical Wearables: What You’ll Be Wearing Next Year, and Beyond

The global medical wearables market is soaring. It was valued at just over $25 billion in 2023, forecast to grow to $30 billion this year, and is projected to reach a whopping $76 billion by 2029, according to business intelligence firm Statista. The category of medical wearables encompasses a swath of products, from wellness devices that simply track how many steps you take in a day to quite sophisticated diagnostic devices that monitor a range of health conditions on the fly. Two recent news items point the way forward on next-gen devices, one which is ready to go and is being demoed at the massive medical trade show Medica in Düsseldorf, Germany, this week, and another that is still in the lab but could result in a quantum leap in the years ahead.

Partnership stretches potential of wearable technology 

Henkel, Covestro, and Quad Industries have joined forces, pooling their different areas of expertise to accelerate developments for advanced medical wearables and to further drive adoption of innovative printed electronics, especially in stretchable materials for healthcare applications.

A supplier of printed electronics materials and services, Henkel notably offers an extensive portfolio of functional inks through its Loctite brand. Products include conductive inks and paints as well as resistive and dielectric inks, and the company increasingly is focused on the medical and healthcare markets. In partnership with Covestro and Quad Industries, it has developed an electrocardiogram patch for continuous monitoring of a patient’s heart activities. Henkel and Covestro developed the materials for the wearable monitor while Quad Industries was responsible for the design and manufacture of the device. The patch will be featured at the Henkel booth (C59) in hall 13 at Medica this week.

Related:Henkel Adapts Molding Technology to Expand Medical Wearables Portfolio

TPU combines processing ease and user comfort

Covestro has developed Platilon-branded thermoplastic polyurethane film designed for high printing quality, processability, and mechanical strength in medical devices. The substrate reportedly facilitates printing, curing, and converting processes for printed electronics while ensuring skin-friendly, soft, and breathable properties for users.

Belgium’s Quad Industries has more than 25 years of experience in printed electronics. In addition to the medical sector, it serves the automotive, home appliance, and automotive industries.

Mating PVDF with peptide leads to breakthrough

Researchers at Northwestern University are opening up a whole new world of possibilities for wearables, among other applications, with a soft, sustainable electro-active material composed of flexible nano-sized ribbons that can be charged just like a battery.

Researchers used peptides and a snippet of a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) molecule to produce arrays that could be woven together into smart fabrics, medical implants, or wearable devices, explains an article on the university website. PVDF has piezoresistive properties, meaning it can generate electrical signals when pressed or squeezed. PVDF is also the first-known plastic with ferroelectric properties — its polar structure can switch orientation by 180 degrees via an external voltage — which is typically found in hard materials. The researchers replaced the lipid tail with a tiny PVDF segment. The combination of two unlikely partners — peptides and plastics — was not a trivial task and led to a breakthrough in many respects, commented the researchers.

The energy-efficient, biocompatible material could be used in low-power microscopic memory chips, sensors, and energy storage units. It also could be integrated into woven fibers to create smart fabrics or medical implants, and wearable devices, where the wristband itself could have electronic activity

The air-conditioned shirt

“We imagine a future where you could wear a shirt with air conditioning built into it or rely on soft bioactive implants that feel like tissues and are activated wirelessly to improve heart or brain function,” explained Samuel I. Stupp, the Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern who led the study. “Those uses require electrical and biological signals, but we cannot build those applications with classic electro-active materials. It’s not practical to put hard materials into our organs or in shirts that people can wear. We need to bring electrical signals into the world of soft materials. That is exactly what we have done in this study,” said Stupp.

The study is published in the journal Nature.