Flexible and Wearble Electronics

- Flexible and Wearable Electronics

Flexible and wearable electronics combines new and traditional materials with large area processes to fabricate lightweight, flexible, printed and multi-functional electronic products. 

[Stanford E-Wear]: "Wearable electronics has emerged as a new form of electronics that combines sensors and wireless communication to allow monitoring of vital information autonomously. Unlike typical sensor networks, wearable electronics need to form conformal and intimate contact with objects to be monitored. Furthermore, they have to be comfortable to wear while providing accurate information."  

Wearable electronics are smart electronic devices that can be connected to the Internet and be worn on the body as accessories. These devices are a key segment of loT devices, and they can exchange data through Internet with the user and other connected devices. Applications for wearable electronics range from health monitoring, disease detection, robotics, robotics surgery, implantable electronics, driverless cars, structural monitoring, virtual reality, augmented reality, etc..

Wearable devices offer benefits like optimized decision-making, ease of handling emergencies, cost cutting, enhanced quality of living, remote control access, healthy lifestyle, time management, commercial benefit, and better safety.  

Along with the explosion of interest in wearable electronics in recent years, numerous challenges nonetheless remain before wearable electronics become a truly commercializable technology. One major challenge is the highly interdisciplinary nature of the field, which mandates the convergence of many disciplines, notably from materials, devices, system integration, software and application verification. The impact is far beyond health care. It will improve everything from the environment to defense, the economy, and energy production.

- Smart Electronic Devices

A smart device is an electronic device, generally connected to other devices or networks via different wireless protocols such as Bluetooth, NFC, Wi-Fi, LiFi, 3G, etc., that can operate to some extent interactively and autonomously. Several notable types of smart devices are smartphones, smart cars, smart thermostats, smart doorbells, smart locks, smart refrigerators, phablets and tablets, smartwatches, smart bands, smart key chains, smart speakers and others. The term can also refer to a device that exhibits some properties of ubiquitous computing, including - although not necessarily - artificial intelligence. 

Smart devices can be designed to support a variety of form factors, a range of properties pertaining to ubiquitous computing and to be used in three main system environments: physical world, human-centered environments and distributed computing environments.