Wearable Innovations: Transformative Impact in Healthcare

Social Impact

The integration of health apps and preventative care wearables is revolutionizing healthcare, with an expected annual reduction of nearly $7 billion in system costs, and enhances health quality and cost-effective treatment. Pioneering this transformation, top companies in digital health technologies drive development of new generations of medical wearable devices that prioritize affordability, safety, and user-friendliness. These devices feature digitally connected capabilities and reliable body sensors, setting a new standard in healthcare technology and promising a profound social impact on the accessibility and effectiveness of healthcare services.

Environmental Impact

The healthcare industry prioritizes sustainability in wearable medical device production, emphasizing eco-friendly materials. Companies are engaged in active research on biodegradable plastics, recycled materials, and low-impact manufacturing to reduce the total environmental footprint. Wearable devices are meticulously engineered for energy efficiency, resulting in extended battery life and a decreased replacement rate. With optimized power consumption and rechargeable batteries, this industry actively promotes energy conservation and reduces electronic waste.

Boyd Leads the Charge in Sustainable Medical Wearables

Boyd takes the lead in medical wearable innovation, championing social and environmental responsibility through streamlined manufacturing and strategic material partnerships. From product inception to launch, we offer expert design and material selection support, ensuring each component is chosen for optimal performance and cost efficiency. Our efficient assembly process produces FDA-compliant wearable devices that prioritize patient comfort and healthcare provider efficiency with unwavering reliability and comprehensive cost management. We aim to inspire industry-wide adoption of similar practices for a more sustainable future.

Learn more about Boyd’s Environmental Responsibility and our commitment to Sustainability.

For our latest Ask an Expert blog, we invited people to submit any questions they had about Medical Wearables. We received questions spanning a breadth of topics, so we had one of our wearable device experts, Steve Baker, answer them.

What components typically make up a medical wearable?

The components in a medical wearable depend on the type, but transmitting wearables with on-board electronics usually include a cover film, thermoformed foam cover, printed flex electrode, printed circuit board assembly (or a printed assembly circuit with a battery), a stick-to-skin adhesive, conductive hydrogels, and a delivery/release liner. For wearables without on-board electronics, they can use a snap connector (or printed flexible electrode with connector), adhesive layer, stick-to-skin foam layer, conductive hydrogels, and a delivery/release liner.

We recently made a video that explains these different medical wearable components in detail.

What are some challenges unique to medical wearable design?

The biggest challenge to medical wearable design is usually deciding how long the adhesive needs to stick to the patient’s skin. What we see from the industry right now is typically seven to twelve days, but there are a few adhesives out there that can be worn for up to twenty. The release factor then becomes a concern; does it irritate the skin based on the aggressiveness of the adhesive? We’re always working with adhesive manufacturers to source new, highly engineered options that enable longer adhesion and more patient comfort.

The other unique wearable challenge is the flexibility and breathability of all the materials in the stack-up. Does the device flex well? Is it comfortable for the patient? Factoring in both challenges into cost structure is always important.

What is something people tend to overlook when designing medical wearables?

Simplicity. It’s counterintuitive, but wearable designers can overestimate their needs with adhesives and layers. Thinking that you need extremely tight tolerances, additional spacers, or the longest-lasting stick-to-skin adhesive sounds great, but it can increase cost and isn’t always necessary. Boyd relies on our years of knowledge and history creating wearable devices to say, that layer isn’t really necessary, this spacer will give you enough of a gap for the hydrogel this adhesive is less expensive and will hold up to the outdoor environment. And if there is a unique use case for a wearable that requires highly engineered materials, we can help work those in, too.

How do you decide on a stick-to-skin adhesive?

Adhesion is the critical factor, which comes down to how long it needs to be worn and the wear conditions. If you go too aggressive with the adhesive, it may cause skin irritation. If you don’t go with an aggressive enough adhesive, it may not stick based on the wear condition. We work with most medical adhesive manufacturers and compounders to meet different requirements. It’s best to reach out to Boyd’s team with your specific project requirements so we can suggest the right adhesive.

What is the tightest tolerance you can achieve on a wearable?

We frequently work with medical wearables that require extremely tight tolerances. It ranges a lot depending on the component, material, complexity, and geometry, but it can get down to +/- 0.05mm for complex, multilayered parts. We’re always happy to look at specific designs and suggest suitable fabrication methods for tolerance requirements.

How can you make wearables more durable?

It’s often moisture ingress that shortens life and decreases performance of a wearable, so the biggest factor is ensuring that you have the right adhesives that seal properly. Adhesives that not only stick to skin, but also between the different layers of the device. This all depends on the use of the wearable and the materials used in the different layers in the stack-up.

What is one of the most exciting medical wearable applications that you have worked on?

We recently worked on a continuous glucose monitor that had unique challenges. It required a very small footprint and included electronics for constant monitoring, so it had to be comfortable and long-lasting, even with all the design parameters involved. It’s always exciting to use our expertise to push the envelope on a solution like this.

That said, I don’t want to downplay simpler wearables, like ECG or EKG sensors. They’re high-volume and cost sensitive, but still have multiple layers and interesting design aspects. It’s also exciting to bring a high-volume, competitive, disposable device to the marketplace.

What do you think is the future of medical wearables?

Wearables are already a multi-billion-dollar market, and it’s growing rapidly. Improvements in battery life technology, stretchable conductive inks, and enhancements to near-field communication (NFC) and Bluetooth are coming. It’ll make the wearable industry much stronger, offering continuous remote patient monitoring outside of doctor’s’ offices and hospitals. It’ll be fully remote, and that’ll really change the medical wearable industry.

We’d like to thank everyone who submitted questions! To learn more about our Medical Wearable capabilities or inquire about your specific requirements, visit our Medical Wearables page or schedule a consultation with our experts.

Streamlining Medical Wearable Device Design for Performance & Total Cost Optimization – Part 2

We sat down with one of our Field Application Engineers to discuss how to optimize and streamline Medical Wearable Device design. Boyd is an expert in streamlining innovative design, manufacturing, and assembly of medical wearables to help product designers and medical device companies design for excellence (DFx). We help designers consider patient comfort & safety, manufacturing efficiency, product lifecycle, and total cost while navigating complex regulatory processes, providing global agility, assuring business continuity, and accelerating time to market.

Here are common questions we get as we work through Medical Wearable Device design projects with leading medical device design and manufacturing clients:

How do you incorporate electronics and functionality into extremely thin medical wearable devices?

Medical Wearable Device designers are tasked with packing a lot of sensitive and critically important electronics into very thin, streamlined wearables. There are all different types of sensor technology used because as sensors get smaller and less expensive, they’re being integrated into more devices and enabling new medical technology.

Types of Sensors Used in Wearable Devices

Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring devices, as an example, sense electrical stimulations based on the location of conductive electrodes worn on the chest. These patches are used to sense things like heart rate, respiratory rate, and arrhythmias. Product designers are also learning how to adapt acoustic sensors to collect heart metrics in different locations like the wrist.

Medical Wearable Devices also sense skin or body temperature with thermistors or thermocouples. Optical sensors on a wearable can measure oxygen saturation. Accelerometers and Gyroscopes can measure the wearer’s activity, movement, and positioning and can measure things like posture and fall detection.

Sharing Medical Wearable Device Data

Each sensor collects data that connects to either an embedded circuit board sandwiched within the wearable patch, or through electrical snap connectors to an external, reusable electronic module affixed to the wearable. Most of these wearable devices are using a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth transmitter to broadcast data to a secure cloud storage source accessed remotely by patients and doctors. Sensors and electronics must also be powered by a small battery which must be considered in the assembly process.

Assembling Medical Wearable Device Components Together

Medical Wearable Devices feature a large amount of very small, precise components. Due to their slim designs, there isn’t much room to accommodate all these components and there is certainly no room for misalignment. Meaning design for manufacturing and assembly accuracy are exceptionally important. Boyd has a lot of complex rotary converting processes that we leverage to cut and assemble with tight tolerance control and registration accuracy in highly automated processes. However, many medical wearable designs cannot be fully converted “on-press” in one continuous process utilizing the efficiency of traditional reel-to-reel converting methods. Because of complexity of the components used like the insertion of an electrical assembly or the attachment of snap connectors or the addition of a molded plastic housing, separate assembly steps are often required. This presents special assembly challenges that require creative process flow and innovative assembly fixture design to achieve efficient throughput and reduced labor costs.

Balancing Volume and Assembly Cost for Medical Wearable Devices

Newer medical wearable designers face special challenges as start-up companies who are trying to introduce a new technology into the market, facing long product development cycles due to regulatory / compliance requirements, and a slow ramp up due to long time of adoption. This means the economics for a fully automated assembly process are typically not feasible given the high NRE investment. Often it comes down to an efficient manual or semi-automated assembly process to help minimize these non-recurring expenses to give your wearable the best chance to succeed in the market. This is where Boyd excels in determining how best to assemble a complicated design in an efficient manner, leveraging the best of our diverse processes to assure trusted quality control. Blending the best of high precision converting with innovative assembly techniques under a highly documented, and process-controlled quality system.