Project Overview

Greeting from the Project Director

A challenge to Brand new electronics

“Innovation in medical healthcare to be triggered by soft electronics!”

Realizing human-friendly devices through soft electronics

 Electronics have been the key technology to founding the current advanced information society. This has been achieved by the aggressive down-scaling of silicon devices, which vastly improved the computing speed and storage capacity of modern electronics.
 However, competition towards higher computing speeds has been already saturated, and is now globally heading toward a new phase that aims to “harmonize with new environments and humans”.
 Conventional electronics are rigid, and therefore not fully compatible with biological tissue. Their lack of flexibility is one of the major limiting factors to creating applications of electronics for medical and bio use. If electronics are built with soft, biocompatible materials, what kinds of innovative technologies can be expected?

The key is the softness of organic materials

 When rigid materials are implanted into biological tissue, they cause inflammation in the surrounding tissue. This is a major barrier for embedding sensors inside the body for long periods of time, such as blood glucose detectors. In order to overcome this problem we have focused on soft and biocompatible molecular nanomaterials such as organic semiconductors, as opposed to conventional inorganic materials such as silicon.
 Organic devices have recently attracted much attention and have been intensively investigated, including organic thin-film transistors which can be used as soft electronic switches. Since organic devices are easily fabricated on polymeric films using solution processes such as printing, they are expected to enable electronics that are simultaneously large area, low cost, lightweight, and mechanical flexible. We aim to develop novel electronic devices that can harmoniously interface with living bodies by taking advantage of the inherent softness of organic materials and the remarkable features of organic molecules.

Professor Takao Someya

Takao Someya
ph. D
JST ERATO Research generalization
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
School of Engineering. the University of Tokyo

Takao Someya  profile
Biomedical applications of organic devices

 Until now, applications of organic devices have been limited to non-biomedical applications such as displays, lightings, and wireless tags. Although organic devices are typically soft and flexible, new innovative technologies have to be developed in order to extend their use to biomedical applications.
 Our research aims to develop organic devices which can communicate with biological tissue, by using soft materials which can accommodate the dynamic behavior of living tissue. These soft organic devices can be fabricated using biocompatible inks, or ‘bio-inks’, with various functionalities. By establishing high-resolution patterning techniques we will be able to create integrated circuits with millions of soft biosensors which will safely integrate with tissue. These probes will be able to sense the electrical and chemical signals of the billions of neurons which exist inside the human brain, and will enable high-resolution visualization of real-time neuron activities.

Biomedical applications of organic devices
Numerous applications are emerging for organic electronics and improving the quality of life

 By utilizing novel organic bio-devices, we aim to complete a visualization of complicated neural networks, and subsequently, a visualization of the activities of a whole brain that is an aggregation of billions of neurons.
 Additionally, organic bio-devices will open up paths to various fields such as applications for medical equipment, welfare IT, and digital healthcare. Specifically, these devices may enable equipment which can treat epilepsy, or adhesive-patch sensors which can monitor health conditions from the surface of the skin without impairing the movement of the user.
 These medical issues are especially important here in Japan, as we are facing decreasing birthrates and an aging population. As a result, improving quality of life for all citizens (especially the elderly) and reducing medical costs are increasingly urgent issues. Telecommunications and electronics have been advanced drastically recently, and as high-speed optical communication networks are developed, and mobile telecommunication devices (i.e. smart phones) are widely in use. With the cutting-edge information infrastructure and electronics technology in modern society, the goal of our research is to resolve various problems associated with the low birthrate and aging of our society, by creating organic bio-devices which can benefit healthcare and medical fields.

Numerous applications are emerging for organic electronics and improving the quality of life