Wearable devices for emerging healthcare applications

Today´s quality of life is supported by medical capabilities that have not been available years ago. These capabilities are not limited to disease treatment only, indeed there has been a paradigm shift to disease prevention and monitoring. Especially continuous monitoring of patients or even of people who are only interested in their health has received increasing interest. Thus, the need and the potential to miniaturize lab-scale monitoring devices have inspired many research projects and start-up companies to create new or to miniaturize medical applications. Challenges in this area comprise low-power/power saving design to extend battery life and to reduce the size of the battery itself. This is followed by size/height/weight reductions to meet user expectations of being “wearable”, biocompatibility of all outer housings, and the final assembly concept. Instead of using a sequential design approach, the complexity mandates to handle all aspects concurrently as early as possible in the design phase. Already during this design phase HDP (high-density packaging) technologies help to meet the size requirements without sacrificing too much flexibility and violating time/cost constraints. This paper will present two miniaturization design strategies, considerations and solutions for two novel medical applications in the health monitoring area.