Principal Investigator: Prof. Nazek El-Atab
Poster Presenter: Aljawharah A. Alsharif
Lab: SAMA Lab
3D printed dry nonadhesive biomedical wearables are of notable interest because, unlike traditional adhesive skin patches, they can be personalized and 3D printed using a variety of materials with distinct properties such as stretchability, conformal interfaces with skin, biocompatibility, wearable comfort, and low-cost manufacturing. Dry nonadhesive wearables, in particular, have the additional advantage of replacing reactive adhesives, which dehydrate and coagulate with prolonged use and are prone to wet conditions. However, issues arise in the performance optimization of recently discovered dry materials. These challenges become even more critical when skin patches are scaled down to a miniaturized size, thereby affecting various biosignal detection applications. Thus, this project focused on designing, fabricating, optimizing, and applying a personalized, fully 3D-printed permeable skin patch with miniaturized octopus-like suckers and embedded microchannels for enhanced mechanical strength, breathability, and biosignal monitoring. The developed device shows a rapid and cost-effective fabrication process for porous skin patches and a printing process for ink metal-based materials, which expands its biomedical applications to low-resource settings and environments.