Design Challenges and Breakthrough Solutions for Emerging Wireless Wearable Technologies

Wearable devices have become ubiquitous in daily life, from smartwatches and rings to patches and smart clothing, playing a crucial role in health monitoring. In this talk, continuous blood monitoring will be used as a representative application to discuss the challenges and innovative solutions for enhancing the functionality, reliability, and user comfort of wearable devices. This talk will present new sensing approaches that improve comfort while maintaining high accuracy and low-power operation. The talk will also introduce circuit-level innovations that enable these sensing approaches while achieving ultra-low power consumption to extend battery life, reduce charging frequency, and potentially enable energy harvesting. Highly integrated system-on-chip (SoC) solutions that consolidate all electronic functions into a single chip will be highlighted for their ability to significantly enhance wearable compactness. Finally, the talk will conclude with system-level perspectives, emphasizing how cross-disciplinary innovations across IC design, materials, and system engineering can drive the next-generation wearable systems.