A soft liquid-metal patch brings clinical-grade heart and breathing checks home

HKUST engineers have built a skin-like patch that tracks breathing and heart activity together, and in pilot tests it matched hospital sleep-study equipment for detecting apnoea.

A team led by Prof. Hnin Yin Yin Nyein in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at HKUST has developed HELP, a heteromodal epidermal liquid-metal patch that records breathing and heart activity at the same time. The work, published in Science Advances with Dr Li Yue as first author, aims to give people with chronic heart and lung conditions continuous monitoring at home.

Liquid metals suit soft electronics because they flex without fatigue, but they grip elastic materials poorly, which causes signal drift. Borrowing from the interlocking structure of gecko feet, the team anchored the metal on a network of silver nanowires over a silicone base. The patch kept stable electrical performance after 500,000 stretching cycles, and graded dome-shaped 'gates' let it register breaths causing less than 0.01% chest strain.

In pilot clinical studies, patients applied the patch themselves in under a minute, and it agreed strongly with gold-standard hospital polysomnography in detecting sleep apnoea events. It also tracked how asthma patients responded to bronchodilators in real time. "Our patch unmasks these physiological changes as the body relaxes during sleep, enabling proactive rather than reactive care," said Prof. Nyein.

Chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma, COPD and obstructive sleep apnoea are among the leading causes of hospitalisation worldwide, yet diagnosis still depends on bulky clinic-based tests. Because the patch is made with a simple stencil-brushing process rather than cleanroom fabrication, the team says it is cost-effective and suited to mass production.

Source: the original release from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, reporting research published in Science Advances. Summarised by GRP Research News.