Session 5: Health Monitors

Low-Power Wearable Sensors Enabled by Large-Area Flexible Organic Photodiodes
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
9:05 AM - 9:25 AM

Photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensors can be used to monitor breathing activity, hypo and hypervolemia and several circulatory conditions. Wearable PPG sensors with reduced power consumption and motion artifacts are highly desirable but challenging to realize with rigid optoelectronic components. Organic photodiodes (PDs), as compared to Si-PDs, provide a unique opportunity to overcome these challenges. Here we report on the realization of large-area (up to 1.5 cm2) flexible organic photodiodes with dark current values smaller than 500 pA/cm2 and responsivity values larger than 0.2 A/W. This performance is comparable to that of small area (0.05 cm2) Si-PDs. Using flexible organic-PDs, we demonstrate the realization of a flexible PPG sensor and present an analysis of its performance using novel sensor architectures enabled by these flexible organic-PDs.