Sensors, Free Full-Text

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Sleep is an essential element to human life, restoring the brain and body from accumulated fatigue from daily activities. Quantitative monitoring of daily sleep quality can provide critical feedback to evaluate human health and life patterns. However, the existing sleep assessment system using polysomnography is not available for a home sleep evaluation, while it requires multiple sensors, tabletop electronics, and sleep specialists. More importantly, the mandatory sleep in a designated lab facility disrupts a subject’s regular sleep pattern, which does not capture one’s everyday sleep behaviors. Recent studies report that galvanic skin response (GSR) measured on the skin can be one indicator to evaluate the sleep quality daily at home. However, the available GSR detection devices require rigid sensors wrapped on fingers along with separate electronic components for data acquisition, which can interrupt the normal sleep conditions. Here, we report a new class of materials, sensors, electronics, and packaging technologies to develop a wireless, soft electronic system that can measure GSR on the wrist. The single device platform that avoids wires, rigid sensors, and straps offers the maximum comfort to wear on the skin and minimize disruption of a subject’s sleep. A nanomaterial GSR sensor, printed on a soft elastomeric membrane, can have intimate contact with the skin to reduce motion artifact during sleep. A multi-layered flexible circuit mounted on top of the sensor provides a wireless, continuous, real-time recording of GSR to classify sleep stages, validated by the direct comparison with the standard method that measures other physiological signals. Collectively, the soft bioelectronic system shows great potential to be working as a portable, at-home sensor system for assessing sleep quality before a hospital visit.