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\"Billions of smart connected products are changing the competitive landscape for business and the daily lives of consumers. This book analyzes the evolution of embedded product intelligence and the impact of smart products on the automotive, wireless, energy, residential and health industries. It considers the transformation of consumer ownership models and privacy issues when smart products continuously monitor consumer behavior. Smart Products, Smarter Services recommends strategies for creating profitable smart ecosystems, product platforms and services\"-- Provided by publisher.

Rapid advances in soft electronics, microfabrication technologies, miniaturization and electronic skins are facilitating the development of wearable sensor devices that are highly conformable and intimately associated with human skin. These devices—referred to as ‘smart skins’—offer new opportunities in the research study of human biology, in physiological tracking for fitness and wellness applications, and in the examination and treatment of medical conditions. Over the past 12 months, electronic skins have been developed that are self-healing, intrinsically stretchable, designed into an artificial afferent nerve, and even self-powered. Greater collaboration between engineers, biologists, informaticians and clinicians will be required for smart skins to realize their full potential and attain wide adoption in a diverse range of real-world settings.

Although using the technologies for a variety of chronic health conditions such as personal health record (PHR) is reported to be acceptable and useful, there is a lack of evidence on the associations between the use of the technologies and the change of health outcome and patients' response to a digital health app. This study aimed to examine the impact of the use of PHR and wearables on health outcome improvement and sustained use of the health app that can be associated with patient engagement. We developed an Android-based mobile phone app and used a wristband-type activity tracker (Samsung Charm) to collect data on health-related daily activities from individual patients. Dietary record, daily step counts, sleep log, subjective stress amount, blood pressure, and weight values were recorded. We conducted a prospective randomized clinical trial across 4 weeks on those diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) who had visited the outpatient clinic of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital. The trial randomly assigned 60 patients to 3 subgroups including 2 intervention groups: (1) mobile app and wearable device users (n=20), (2) mobile app-only users (n=20), and (3) controls (n=20). The primary outcome measure was weight change. Body weights before and after the trial were recorded and analyzed during clinic visits. Changes in OSA-related respiratory parameters such as respiratory disturbance, apnea-hypopnea, and oxygenation desaturation indexes and snoring comprised the secondary outcome and were analyzed for each participant. We collected the individual data for each group during the trial, specifically anthropometric measurement and laboratory test results for health outcomes, and the app usage logs for patient response were collected and analyzed. The body weight showed a significant reduction in the 2 intervention groups after intervention, and the mobile app-only group showed more weight loss compared with the controls (P=.01). There were no significant changes in sleep-related health outcomes. From a patient response point of view, the average daily step counts (8165 steps) from the app plus wearable group were significantly higher than those (6034 steps) from the app-only group because they collected step count data from different devices (P=.02). The average rate of data collection was not different in physical activity (P=.99), food intake (P=.98), sleep (P=.95), stress (P=.70), and weight (P=.90) in the app plus wearable and app-only groups, respectively. We tried to integrate PHR data that allow clinicians and patients to share lifelog data with the clinical workflow to support lifestyle interventions. Our results suggest that a PHR-based intervention may be successful in losing body weight and improvement in lifestyle behavior. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03200223; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03200223 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/74baZmnCX).

Skin-like intrinsically stretchable soft electronic devices are essential to realize next-generation remote and preventative medicine for advanced personal healthcare 1 – 4 . The recent development of intrinsically stretchable conductors and semiconductors has enabled highly mechanically robust and skin-conformable electronic circuits or optoelectronic devices 2 , 5 – 10 . However, their operating frequencies have been limited to less than 100 hertz, which is much lower than that required for many applications. Here we report intrinsically stretchable diodes—based on stretchable organic and nanomaterials—capable of operating at a frequency as high as 13.56 megahertz. This operating frequency is high enough for the wireless operation of soft sensors and electrochromic display pixels using radiofrequency identification in which the base-carrier frequency is 6.78 megahertz or 13.56 megahertz. This was achieved through a combination of rational material design and device engineering. Specifically, we developed a stretchable anode, cathode, semiconductor and current collector that can satisfy the strict requirements for high-frequency operation. Finally, we show the operational feasibility of our diode by integrating it with a stretchable sensor, electrochromic display pixel and antenna to realize a stretchable wireless tag. This work is an important step towards enabling enhanced functionalities and capabilities for skin-like wearable electronics. A stretchable anode, cathode, semiconductor and current collector have been developed to create stretchable diodes that can operate at megahertz frequencies for use in wirelessly operated, skin-like wearable electronics.

Wearable activity trackers offer the opportunity to increase physical activity through continuous monitoring. Viewing tracker use as a beneficial health behavior, we explored the factors that facilitate and hinder long-term activity tracker use, applying the transtheoretical model of behavior change with the focus on the maintenance stage and relapse. The aim of this study was to investigate older adults' perceptions and uses of activity trackers at different points of use: from nonuse and short-term use to long-term use and abandoned use to determine the factors to maintain tracker use and prevent users from discontinuing tracker usage. Data for the research come from 10 focus groups. Of them, 4 focus groups included participants who had never used activity trackers (n=17). These focus groups included an activity tracker trial. The other 6 focus groups (without the activity tracker trial) were conducted with short-term (n=9), long-term (n=11), and former tracker users (n=11; 2 focus groups per user type). The results revealed that older adults in different tracker use stages liked and wished for different tracker features, with long-term users (users in the maintenance stage) being the most diverse and sophisticated users of the technology. Long-term users had developed a habit of tracker use whereas other participants made an effort to employ various encouragement strategies to ensure behavior maintenance. Social support through collaboration was the primary motivator for long-term users to maintain activity tracker use. Short-term and former users focused on competition, and nonusers engaged in vicarious tracker use experiences. Former users, or those who relapsed by abandoning their trackers, indicated that activity tracker use was fueled by curiosity in quantifying daily physical activity rather than the desire to increase physical activity. Long-term users saw a greater range of pros in activity tracker use whereas others focused on the cons of this behavior. The results suggest that activity trackers may be an effective technology to encourage physical activity among older adults, especially those who have never tried it. However, initial positive response to tracker use does not guarantee tracker use maintenance. Maintenance depends on recognizing the long-term benefits of tracker use, social support, and internal motivation. Nonadoption and relapse may occur because of technology's limitations and gaining awareness of one's physical activity without changing the physical activity level itself.

The primary developing trends in flexible and stretchable electronics involve the innovation of material synthesis, mechanical design, and fabrication strategies that employ soft substrates. The biggest challenge is that the entire electronic system must allow not only bending but also stretching. Therefore, stretchable conductors become a crucial construction unit for the connection of working circuits of various stretchable devices. Owing to the success of stretchable conductors, various stretchable electronic devices are fabricated with the help of multiple manufacturing strategies, including stretchable heaters, stretchable energy conversion and storage devices, stretchable transistors, sensors and artificial skin. The continuous development of stretchable electronics has led to the new functionality of transparency, and the fabrication of transparent stretchable electronic devices has gained a lot of interest due to the potential of wearable electronic systems. This review presents technology developments in the preparation of related materials, fabrication strategies and various applications of stretchable electronics. It focuses on the fundamental structural design, mechanisms, and tactics, as well as on challenges and opportunities in the manufacture of stretchable electronic devices and their various applications.

Displays are basic building blocks of modern electronics 1 , 2 . Integrating displays into textiles offers exciting opportunities for smart electronic textiles—the ultimate goal of wearable technology, poised to change the way in which we interact with electronic devices 3 – 6 . Display textiles serve to bridge human–machine interactions 7 – 9 , offering, for instance, a real-time communication tool for individuals with voice or speech difficulties. Electronic textiles capable of communicating 10 , sensing 11 , 12 and supplying electricity 13 , 14 have been reported previously. However, textiles with functional, large-area displays have not yet been achieved, because it is challenging to obtain small illuminating units that are both durable and easy to assemble over a wide area. Here we report a 6-metre-long, 25-centimetre-wide display textile containing 5 × 10 5 electroluminescent units spaced approximately 800 micrometres apart. Weaving conductive weft and luminescent warp fibres forms micrometre-scale electroluminescent units at the weft–warp contact points. The brightness between electroluminescent units deviates by less than 8 per cent and remains stable even when the textile is bent, stretched or pressed. Our display textile is flexible and breathable and withstands repeated machine-washing, making it suitable for practical applications. We show that an integrated textile system consisting of display, keyboard and power supply can serve as a communication tool, demonstrating the system’s potential within the ‘internet of things’ in various areas, including healthcare. Our approach unifies the fabrication and function of electronic devices with textiles, and we expect that woven-fibre materials will shape the next generation of electronics. A large electronic display textile that is flexible, breathable and withstands repeated machine-washing is integrated with a keyboard and power supply to create a wearable, durable communication tool.

Patients with acute MI and an ejection fraction of 35% or less were randomly assigned to receive a wearable cardioverter–defibrillator plus medical therapy or medical therapy alone. At 90 days, there was no significant between-group difference in the rate of arrhythmic death.

Although the exfoliation of monolayers of materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides produces high-quality electronic materials with low defect densities, the size of the monolayers is limited to the micrometer scale. Liu et al. modified this method by creating atomically flat gold layers on polymer supports. The strong van der Waals adhesion of the gold layer allowed monolayers to be exfoliated on the centimeter scale. Multilayers could be reassembled to artificial structures, such as a MoSe 2 /WSe 2 single-crystal bilayer with a twist angle chosen to quench intralayer exciton formation. Science , this issue p. 903 A polymer-supported atomically flat gold tape exfoliated centimeter-scale monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides. Two-dimensional materials from layered van der Waals (vdW) crystals hold great promise for electronic, optoelectronic, and quantum devices, but technological implementation will be hampered by the lack of high-throughput techniques for exfoliating single-crystal monolayers with sufficient size and high quality. Here, we report a facile method to disassemble vdW single crystals layer by layer into monolayers with near-unity yield and with dimensions limited only by bulk crystal sizes. The macroscopic monolayers are comparable in quality to microscopic monolayers from conventional Scotch tape exfoliation. The monolayers can be assembled into macroscopic artificial structures, including transition metal dichalcogenide multilayers with broken inversion symmetry and substantially enhanced nonlinear optical response. This approach takes us one step closer to mass production of macroscopic monolayers and bulk-like artificial materials with controllable properties.

Electronics are set to merge with our bodies to extend our perceptions. Smartphones and watches will give way to the bodyNET1: a network of sensors, screens and smart devices woven into our clothing, worn on our skin and implanted in our bodies (see 'Superhuman powers').