- This Computer Patch Performs Instant AI Analysis on Skin for Health Data
- Minimum latency is essential for conditions such as ventricular fibrillation
- It could also look at robotics and artificial intelligence for disaster relief.
Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have developed a computing patch that can run AI models directly on the body, rather than sending data to a connected smartphone, cloud server, or other external processor.
Published in the journal Nature Electronics, researcher Sihong Wang compared the development to having an “instant, personal doctor built into your device.” [users’] devices.”
Although far from being commercially available, the technology addresses the fact that most wearable devices today basically serve only as data collectors. While smartwatches have long measured heart rate, movement, oxygen levels, ECG signals, and more, that data is typically transferred to a smartphone for analysis, or even to cloud servers in the case of the recently launched Google Health with AI capabilities.
Skin-based AI inference could revolutionize healthcare
The new patch developed by researchers performs both AI detection and inference directly on the skin, and the analysis is performed in milliseconds without relying on wireless communication, cloud computing or other external factors.
Ultra-low latency is especially important for some medical conditions such as ventricular fibrillation, where even a few seconds of latency could make a difference.
However, this technology also has other benefits, with the paper highlighting a reduction in power consumption and privacy risks thanks to on-device processing.
Stretchable transistors that bend and conform to the skin are credited with making the patch possible, while conventional chips and rigid silicon in legacy hardware would have previously made it impossible. However, a layer of gel electrolyte presented its own challenges, threatening to move like a liquid and short-circuit electrical components.
“What we had to ask was whether we could use or change the properties of these polymers to make them compatible with photolithography, the main patterning method used in the microelectronics industry,” Wang added.
Ventricular fibrillation was clearly a major focus of the study and, thanks to a donated human heart, the team was able to confirm the patch’s ability to localize wavefront positions with 99.6% accuracy.
The research claims to enable “various edge processing functions applicable to various types of health data, including multilayer perceptron (MLP) for heart attack prediction and convolution operations for precise tracking of arrhythmia fibrillation wavefronts on the surface of the heart.”
While this specific study relates to skin patches, it also alludes to a future of “body-implantable” computing for true smart health. “High-resolution signal measurements” are intended for next-generation implantables to obtain highly accurate, real-time data from real living organs.
The future of this technology extends far beyond human healthcare
In addition to human data, patches and implantables with embedded computing could also modernize robotics, giving humanoids human-like senses with real-time precision, making them perfect for disaster recovery efforts where wireless communications may be unreliable.
This type of reinforcement learning was put to the test in a study with an ant-like robot, where the miniature robot was able to navigate environments with success comparable to conventional computer simulations.
Looking ahead, commercial versions of this technology would mark a major shift in artificial intelligence, where the technology is deployed at the edge rather than in latency-prone data centers.
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