There is nothing more personal than healthcare. Health care should move from its current reactive and disease-centric system to a personalized, predictive, preventative, and participatory model with a focus on disease prevention and health promotion. As the world marches into the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G wireless, technology renovation enables the industry to offer a more individually tailored approach to healthcare with better health outcomes, higher quality, and lower cost. However, empowering the utility of IoT-enabled technologies for personalized health care is still significantly challenged by the shortage of cost-effective wearable biomedical devices to continuously provide real-time, patient-generated health data. Textiles have been concomitant and playing a vital role in the long history of human civilization. The textile forms endow biomedical devices with biocompatible, biodegradable, even bioabsorbable features, allowing them to serve as on-body healthcare platforms with incomparable wearing comfort. Merging biomedical devices and textiles becomes increasingly important owing to the growing trend of IoT. In this talk, I will introduce our current research on smart textiles for biomedical monitoring and personalized diagnosis, textile for therapy, and textile power generation as an energy solution for future wearable medical devices.
Dr. Jun Chen is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on nanotechnology and bioelectronics for energy, sensing, and therapeutic applications in the form of smart textiles, wearables, and body area networks. He has already published 2 books, 180 journal articles and 100 of them are as corresponding authors in Chemical Reviews, Chemical Society Reviews, Nature Materials, Nature Electronics, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Joule, Matter, and many others. His works were selected as Research Highlights by Nature and Science 6 times and covered by world mainstream media over 1,000 times in total, including NPR, ABC, NBC, Reuters, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and Newsweek. He also filed 14 US patents and licensed 1. With a current h-index of 78, Dr. Chen was identified to be one of the world’s most influential researchers in the field of Materials Science by the Web of Science Group. He and his recent research is recognized by the Vebleo Fellow, IAAM Scientist Medal, 30 Life Sciences Leaders To Watch by Informa, UCLA Society of Hellman Fellows Award, Okawa Foundation Research Award, Advanced Materials Rising Star, ACS Nano Rising Stars Lectureship Award, Chem. Soc. Rev. Emerging Investigator Award, 2020 Altmetric Top 100, Top 10 Science Stories of 2020 by Ontario Science Centre, Highly Cited Researchers 2020/2019/2021 in Web of Science, Frontiers in Chemistry Rising Stars, JMCA Emerging Investigator Award, Nanoscale Emerging Investigator Award, ACS AEM Early Career Investigators Award, MINE2020 Young Scientist Excellence Award, and many others. Beyond research, he is an associate editor of Biosensors and Bioelectronics.