 Hello and welcome to Top 10 Emerging Technologies, a show from the World Economic Forum that takes a look back at some of the most promising technologies of the last decade. I'm Greta Keenan, your host, and in this episode we'll be talking about body-adapted wearable electronics which made it onto our 2014 list. To get us started, let's take a look back at this talk from Professor Arias of UC Berkeley at one of our events in 2015 explaining the promise of this next generation of wearables. Today, electronics is everywhere. We are becoming more attached to our electronic devices and using these devices in ways that we could not imagine possible two decades ago. Electronics help us communicate, stay close to our loved ones, be more efficient at work and even at staying healthy. Due to the advances that we have in hardware and software, we are quickly moving towards in-home care and also constant monitoring of our vital signs. But if we look at the way we design and build electronics, we will see that the rate of which we fabricate and assemble electronics is moving much slower pace than the way we use the electronics. You see that discrete components are still assembled into hard boards and at the end the devices that we carry have a rigid format. So what if we started designing electronics in a different way? What if electronics were flexible, lightweight, conformal to the body? How would that change the diagnostic methods that we have today? Here to tell us more about body-adapted wearable electronics is Professor Joseph Constantine, an electrical engineering professor from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon and also a World Economic Forum Young Scientist. Hi Joseph, thanks for joining us. I'm very happy to be here. So Joseph, wearables don't feel all too unfamiliar to us in 2021 with lots of people wearing wristbands or watches that track their health and fitness. Tell us just how widespread these devices are and what proportion of them are actually adapted to the human body. So to be body-adapted really is to enclose the body needs into the design criteria. The components have to adapt the body needs and to the logical specification. However, of course, there is a whole range of wearable devices such as smart watches, wristbands, patches, electronic skins, electronic textiles, you know, smart lenses. Well, these devices are definitely widespread. So fast forward to today in 2021. What big breakthroughs have happened in science to allow these wearables to be adapted to the shape of the human body? We've seen plenty of innovations where these wearable electronics are actually monitoring, let's say, glucose or lactate or other biomarkers that are extremely important. But one major thing also is the manufacturing. So additive manufacturing and ink just printing for flexible electronics allows these electronics to be integrated into smaller landscape and into more flexible landscape and into closing, for example, or other wearable apparatus. Also, you know, flexible electronics have jumped operation into higher frequency bands. So now you can see flexible electronics operating in the microwave range or millimeter wave range of the spectrum in order to leverage, let's say, electromagnetic wave sensing or even optical spectroscopy. This development and this innovation is accompanied by the leap in technology that has happened and by actually leveraging different parts of the frequencies, different parts of the spectrum and different parts of the manufacturing potential. Joseph, people might be pretty familiar with wristbands that monitor their health and fitness. Can you share with us an example of a body adapted wearable electronic device that maybe people are not so familiar with? Some companies have introduced wearable garments like wearable underwear that can tell your heart rate, that can tell you about, you know, your physical state or your physiological health. Others can, for example, use microfluidics to harvest a sweat and from sweat they can actually characterize lactase and inform, for example, athletes about their progress in training. So, plenty of examples where these body wearables or on-body adapted wearables have advanced and are being used to actually monitor and diagnose the health of individuals. What can we expect from body adapted wearable electronics in the next five to ten years? Well, in the future you won't need to buy separate devices to monitor different biomarkers or different components or to continuously monitor your health. You just wear your daily clothes, which will be equipped with invisible flexible sensors that will monitor all the functionalities that you need. In fact, not only they will monitor the functionalities but they will also predict any serious health episodes that you may have and even they can warn your physician that you may be having, let's say, a heart attack or you may be having any sort of a seizure. You will be sent by what you wear in your daily routine in a comfortable, pain-free and completely convenient manner. Some people will have concerns about data privacy when it comes to these body adaptable wearables. Do you think that something people should be concerned about as this technology moves forward? Now, of course, the companies that are producing these or will be producing these wearable on-body sensors must have very clear terms on their privacy protection, on their privacy terms and the user must be able to accept or not accept these privacy terms without feeling that they're losing the actual services or the actual benefits of these on-body wearables. If it comes to me, I have my trust in a safe, reliable future that is filled with plenty of on-body wearable technologies and especially wearable wireless sensing technologies. If I may ask, what's your personal dream when it comes to body adapted wearables? Let's say we were having this conversation again in five to ten years time. What would you be wearing or what sensors would you have on you and what would they be measuring? If you talk about on-body wearables, I would be wearing smart clothing that would be wirelessly sensing my heart rate, my cholesterol, for example, lactate, for sure. These are the things that I care about that fit my lifestyle. Thank you for that and thank you for sharing all of your expertise today and all of your insightful answers in response to body adapted wearables. As we've heard today, there's been a huge amount of progress on body adapted wearable electronics since they were named one of the top ten emerging technologies of 2014. For instance, these devices are much more personalized to the individual now. This makes them much better used in the diagnostic capacity and really brings healthcare from the clinic into the home. Clearly, there's a lot of excitement about where this technology could go in the next five to ten years, but front of mind for everyone, particularly those wearing these devices, will be data privacy. If you enjoyed this episode, please join us on social media and keep the conversation going there, and we'll see you next time for the next episode of Top Ten Emerging Technologies.