Jeehwan Kim
Associate Professor, MIT Mechanical Engineering

SENSE.nano 2021
Monday, October 25
Session 1: Movement & Motion
2:05 PM - 2:20 PM EDT

Abstract
Electronic skins (e-skins)—electronic sensors mechanically compliant to human skin—have long been developed as an ideal electronic platform for noninvasive human health monitoring. For reliable physical health monitoring, the interface between the e-skin and human skin must be conformal and intact consistently. However, conventional e-skins cannot perfectly permeate sweat in normal day-to-day activities, resulting in degradation of the intimate interface over time and impeding stable physical sensing.

In this talk, Kim will present a sweat pore–inspired perforated e-skin that can effectively suppress sweat accumulation and allow inorganic sensors to obtain physical health information without malfunctioning. The auxetic dumbbell through-hole patterns in perforated e-skins lead to synergistic effects on physical properties including mechanical reliability, conformability, areal mass density, and adhesion to the skin. The perforated e-skin allows one to laminate onto the skin with consistent homeostasis, enabling multiple inorganic sensors on the skin to reliably monitor the wearer’s health over a period of weeks.

Biography
Professor Jeehwan Kim joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September 2015 and the Materials Science and Engineering in February 2016 as a joint appointment. He is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Prof. Kim's group focuses on innovation in nanotechnology for electronic/photonic/energy applications.

Before joining MIT, he was a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY since 2008, where he has led multiple projects including thin film solar cells, graphene electronics, and next generation computing. Many of his patents have been licensed for commercialization. Prof. Kim is a recipient of 20 IBM high value invention achievement awards. In 2012, he was appointed a “Master Inventor” of IBM in recognition of his active intellectual property generation and commercialization of his research. He is an inventor of 210 issued/pending US patents and an author of 40 articles in journals. He received his B.S. from Hongik University, his M.S. from Seoul National University, and his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2008, all of them in Materials Science.