Professor Ni Zhao, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

With the growing aging population and prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, there is an increasing demand for developing personal healthcare systems that can frequently collect physiological parameters of patients during their daily life, thus allowing early disease detection and timely response of health treatments. Wearable medical electronics have been proposed owing to their capability of continuously monitoring the physiological conditions of individuals outside hospitals.

In this talk I will present the emerging nanotechnologies and analytical methods that enable a new generation of intelligent health monitoring devices. I will mainly focus on the design and fabrication of flexible mechanical and optical sensors for high accuracy measurement of blood pressure, a key bio-marker for cardiovascular systems. The optical sensor exploits a hybrid inorganic LED - organic phototransistor sensing scheme to provide high quality photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal monitoring. Through composition tuning and device engineering, we have achieved high-precision heart rate variability tracking and for the first time realized accurate and continuous arterial blood pressure monitoring with an epidermal optoelectronic device. A multiwavelength PPG approach has also been developed to enable tracking of multiple physiological parameters with a single sensing device.

Ni Zhao is currently an Associate Professor at the Electronics Engineering Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D degree in Physics from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2008. From 2008-2010 she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). Her current research interests include optoelectronic devices, wearable biomedical devices and optical spectroscopy.