Research Projects

‘COVID-19 pandemic’ has become synonymous with every human being, and so has the topic of healthcare. General awareness about health monitoring and living a healthy lifestyle has gotten ingrained in the general public’s life. People have been going after many health monitoring devices to keep track of their health parameters in real-time. The use of such health monitoring devices has grown exponentially to reach USD 600 Billion. A fair share of this chunk ~ USD 30 Billion comprises wearable health monitoring devices. One key challenge in this exponentially growing area of wearable healthcare devices is the need to power up the device for a long duration to maintain continuous monitoring. However, most smart wearable devices need a recharging every day, thereby not catering to uninterrupted healthcare monitoring. Increasing the battery size to accommodate long usage times has its drawbacks – the device becomes bulky and, hence, unsuitable for long usage requirements. These issues multiply when such devices have to be used off-grid in locations/situations like – travelling in remote areas with no/intermittent grid power supply. Overall, we need a solution that ensures more extended durability of powering the device and at the same time maintain a lightweight profile. This proposal aims to address the above challenges and, in brief, propose a nanofabricated ultra-flexible self-powered asymmetric supercapacitor for powering wearable healthcare devices. This device can be powered through sunlight or diffused light that too while the healthcare device is in use. This eliminates the need to recharge the battery every day (a problem faced in current devices) and facilitates truly continuous health monitoring. Moreover, this is one of the most practical solutions for using wearable healthcare devices in an off-grid location/situation where sunlight or diffused light are always available.

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