eWEAR Symposium 2020

Angela McIntyre is the Executive Director of the Stanford Wearable Electronics (eWEAR) Initiative. She manages the eWEAR affiliates program and provides member companies opportunities to connect with research and events related to wearables at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, Angela was the lead analyst for industry research on wearables at Gartner. She advised companies bringing emerging wearable technology to market and was a frequent speaker at industry events. Her research included wearables as part of the Internet of Things, for artificial intelligence applications, for healthcare and as human-machine interfaces. Angela’s career in the tech industry also includes management of multi-company research programs at Intel and of R&D collaborations with semiconductor process equipment suppliers at Texas Instruments. Angela has an M.S. in Electronic Materials from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.S. in Management from MIT Sloan School and a Bachelors of Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton.

Prior to joining Stanford in 2004, Zhenan Bao was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. She received her Ph.D in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1995. She has over 500 refereed publications and over 65 US patents with a Google Scholar H-Index >160. She pioneered a number of molecular design concepts for organic electronic materials. Her work has enabled flexible electronic circuits and displays. In the past ten years, she pioneered the field of skin-inspired organic electronic materials, which resulted in unprecedented performance or functions in medical devices, energy storage and environmental applications. Bao is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors. Bao was selected as Nature’s Ten people who mattered in 2015 as a “Master of Materials” for her work on artificial electronic skin. She was awarded the inaugural ACS Central Science Disruptor and Innovator Prize in 2020, the Wilhelm Exner Medal by Austrian Federal Minister of Science 2018, ACS Award on Applied Polymer Science 2017, the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award in the Physical Sciences 2017, the AICHE Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering in 2014.

Skin is the body’s largest organ, and is responsible for the transduction of a vast amount of information. This conformable, stretchable, self-healable and biodegradable material simultaneously collects signals from external stimuli that translate into information such as pressure, pain, and temperature. The development of electronic materials, inspired by the complexity of this organ is a tremendous, unrealized materials challenge. However, the advent of organic-based electronic materials may offer a potential solution to this longstanding problem. In this talk, I will describe the design of skin-inspired sensors and their applications in robotics and implantable applications.

Monroe Kennedy III is an assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. He leads the Assistive Robotics and Manipulation laboratory (arm.stanford.edu), which will develop robotic assistants by focusing on combining modeling and control techniques together with machine learning tools. Together, these techniques will improve performance for tasks that are highly dynamic, require dexterity, have considerable complexity and require human-robot collaboration. Prof. Kennedy received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics and Masters in Robotics at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Dr. Vijay Kumar, with a focus in robotics in the GRASP Lab. He was the recipient of GEM and NSF graduate fellowships. During his graduate studies, his research focused on increasing the abilities and effectiveness of robotic mobile manipulators performing complex service tasks in unstructured environments with considerations for working alongside human collaborators.

Over the past few decades, robotics has matured from precision in repetitive manufacturing tasks towards autonomy in unstructured environments. Recent advancements in robotics provide robots the potential to become formidable teammates with humans in collaborative tasks. In this talk, we will discuss considerations for effective robotic teammates, emphasizing the importance of modeling, which is necessary for the prediction of the task as well as of the collaborator(s). We will examine the system comprised of the Human, robot, and task and the associated perception-action relationships with considerations for how we can improve the robot’s ability to monitor and model this combined system and become an effective collaborator.

Michael Au is the Senior Manager (R&D) at Sonova, one of the major hearing instrument (aid) manufacturers. He received his engineering education from the University of California, Berkeley. With the team, Michael is constantly on the quest to create meaningful improvements to the lives of the hearing impaired – from designing the “invisible” hearing aids to finding practical applications with ear-worn sensors for healthy living. To set the scene for this talk, he will provide an overview of the current hearing instrument landscape and present the vision of hearing well means living well. He will discuss the Ear, that it is more than an organ that connects us to each other and the world, but also a route to evaluate the human performance. Lastly, he will present the opportunities created by, and challenges to, performing biometric measurements with ear-worn devices.

Walter Greenleaf is a neuroscientist and a medical technology developer working at Stanford University. Walter’s current research focus is on developing computer supported clinical products, with a specific emphasis on applying virtual reality and digital health technology to address difficult problems in behavioral and physical medicine such as Post-traumatic Stress, Anxiety Disorders, Depression, Traumatic Brain Injury and Stroke, Addictions, and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Dr. Greenleaf is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with mediaX at Stanford University, a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and the Director of Technology Strategy at the University of Colorado National Mental Health Innovation Center. He previously served as the Director of the Mind Division at the Stanford Center on Longevity, with a focus on age-related changes in cognition. Walter earned a Ph.D. in Neuro and Bio-Behavioral Sciences from the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he was awarded a NIMH Graduate Fellowship.

The onrushing wave of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technology will profoundly impact healthcare.
Working in concert with data analytics provided by wearable technology, VR and AR technology will shift the locus of clinical care from the hospital and the clinic to the home and workplace, and through improved analytics enable personalized medicine. We know from decades of clinical research that VR/AR technology can provide breakthrough solutions that address the most difficult problems in healthcare – ranging from mood disorders such as anxiety and depression to PTSD, addictions, autism, cognitive aging, stroke recovery, and physical rehabilitation, to name just a few. Individualized health and wellness protocols/treatment plans can be enhanced by using VR and AR to promote adherence and to encourage healthy lifestyles. As the cost of healthcare rises, VR and AR technology can serve as an effective telemedicine platform to reduce costs of care delivery and improve clinical efficiency.

Carla Pugh, MD, PhD, FACS is a Professor of Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Director of the Technology Enabled Clinical Improvement (T.E.C.I.) Center. Her clinical area of expertise is Acute Care Surgery. She is reported to be the first surgeon in the United States to obtain a PhD in Education and her goal is to use technology to change the face of medical and surgical education. Her research involves the use of simulation and advanced engineering technologies to develop new approaches for assessing and defining competency in clinical procedural skills. Dr. Pugh holds three patents on the use of sensor and data acquisition technology to measure and characterize hands-on clinical skills. Currently, over two hundred medical and nursing schools are using one of her sensor enabled training tools for their students and trainees. She is considered to be a leading, international expert on the use of sensors and motion tracking technologies for performance measurement.

In surgery, it is accepted that there may be a ten to twenty-year learning curve to reach mastery for certain procedures. Dr. Pugh and her research team at the Technology Enabled Clinical Improvement (T.E.C.I.) Center believe this timeline can and should be shortened to improve patient care. This talk will explore how the use of wearable sensor and motion-tracking technologies can enable the measurement of hands-on performance in clinical procedural skills. Dr. Pugh will describe the data collection and analysis techniques that are used in haptic-enabled simulation environments to assess intra-operative judgement of medical trainees.

Amit Etkin, MD, PhD is the Founder, and CEO of Alto Neuroscience, as well as a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a member of the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute at Stanford. He has received multiple awards, most notably the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2017, for groundbreaking work in clinical psychiatry and neuroscience. Dr. Etkin is trained as both as a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, with scientific experience ranging from molecular biology through machine learning and human clinical trials. The overarching aim of the Dr. Etkin’s work has been understanding the neural basis of emotional disorders and their treatment, and leveraging this knowledge to better understand how the brain works and to develop novel treatment interventions. Alto builds on this work in order to advance precision psychiatry with respect to actionable, real-world, clinical and commercial outcomes.

Over the past two decades, brain imaging studies have defined a set of distributed brain systems that contribute to cognition, emotion, mood and other mental processes. Perturbations in these circuits have been identified in different ways across psychiatric disorders. Yet, these insights have not translated to the development and deployment of treatments in psychiatry. I will discuss work on neural circuit signatures that either define specific biologically-discrete forms of psychopathology, or predict treatment outcome, doing so at the individual patient level through a range of new machine learning-based analyses of electroencephalography (EEG) data. Together, these data suggest that we are now on the brink of scalable and clinically-applied innovations in circuit-based diagnostics and treatments for mental illness, thereby taking us beyond dependence on symptom checklists for diagnosis, and having only one-size-fits-all treatments.

Simona Onori is an Assistant Professor at Stanford University in Energy Resources Engineering and Director of the Stanford Energy Control Lab (onorilab.stanford.edu). Prior to Stanford, she was an Assistant Professor at Clemson University-International Center for Automotive Research. Prof. Onori held a control research position at Thales-Alenia Space, in Rome, Italy where she worked on developing control algorithms for satellite control attitude stability. She was a Research Scientist with the Center for Automotive Research and lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The Ohio State University. Simona Onori received her Laurea Degree, summa cum laude in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, her M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Mexico, and her Ph.D. in Control Engineering from University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. She is the recipient of numerous awards, such as the 2019 Award for Excellence from the Board of Trustees of Clemson University and the 2018 Global Innovation Contest by LGChem.

Yi Cui is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford in 2005, Yi was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Berkeley. He earned a Ph.D in Chemistry at Harvard University and a B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). His expertise is on materials design, synthesis, characterization and device applications for energy, environment and quantum materials. His research spans a breadth of applications, including batteries, solar cells, electrocatalysts, water and air filtration, soil cleanup, thermal textiles and wearables, 2D materials and topological insulators. Prof. Cui has published ~500 research papers and has more than 50 patents. He is a Fellow of Materials Research Society, Electrochemical Society and Royal Society of Chemistry. Yi Cui is a Co‐Director of the Bay Area Photovoltaics Consortium and a Co‐Director of Battery 500 Consortium. He founded three companies to commercialize technologies from his group: Amprius Inc., 4C Air Inc. and EEnotech.

Yurie (Emma) Goto is a sales and marketing associate for the Medical Division at Nitto Denko. Her role spans a wide range of responsibilities, including international business development and market research, and she is now exploring new product developments and business opportunities in wearables. She received her B.S. in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California.

Founded in 1918, Nitto Denko is a leading diversified materials manufacturer from Japan that provides more than 13,500 products in more than 70 industries, such as electronics, transportation, infrastructure, and life science. Products include polarizing films and transparent conductive films for smartphones and TV displays, plastic optical cables that enable high-speed communications, flexible printed circuits, and adhesive materials for electronic devices. In the healthcare field, Nitto is developing medical tapes and transdermal drug delivery patches in addition to supporting the development of oligonucleotide therapeutics. One noteworthy technology is its Stratagel® adhesive, a skin-friendly adhesive designed to minimize the removal of the stratum corneum while maintaining its adhesiveness. In today’s presentation, Emma will introduce how Nitto is expanding its use of this and many other technologies for patch type wearables that need to adhere well to the body while maintaining comfort and safety for the user.