Further Reading

We demonstrate a low-cost battery-free rapidly deployable and disposable patch for electrophysiological monitoring. This was performed by printing a stretchable AgInGa circuit over a temporary tattoo paper that is then transferred to a volunteer’s chest. The disposable patch BOM cost is less than 1$US, and can be rapidly customized with the presented printing technique. We showed that the electrodes printed with this method provide low skin-electrode impedance and excellent signal to noise ratio. The patch is then interfaced with a battery-free circuit for data acquisition, processing and communication via Bluetooth (Alberto et al., 2020).

Historically this has been a large and bulky technology, restricted to the monitoring of subjects in a lab or clinic while they are stationary. Over the last decade much research effort has been put into the creation of “wearable EEG” which overcomes these limitations and allows the long term non-invasive recording of brain signals while people are out of the lab and moving about.

Researchers at Graz University of Technology in Styria, Austria have come up with a more subtle, user-friendly device for measuring brain activity: wafer-thin "tattoo" electrodes that are barely detectable on the skin (Linder, 2020).