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26 PCB007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2018 Star Trek with my dad and younger brother in the late 1960s, this wearable technology would have been thought to be crazy. If I have learned anything by being in a technological industry for four decades, it's that something is only crazy until someone does it! It should be noted that the original Star Trek series that has inspired 50 years of innovation only ran for three seasons! If I didn't double-check it for myself, I wouldn't have believed it. This just goes to show that there is no time constraint for game-changing in- novation. I'm not sure "Bones" could ever see a time when a computer could be held in our hands: Captain Kirk: "Well, Bones, do the new medical facilities meet with your ap- proval?" Bones McCoy: "They do not. It's like working in a damn computer center!" PCB007 Steve Williams is the president of The Right Approach Consulting. To read past columns or contact Williams, click here. Arias, a professor of electrical engineering and comput- er sciences at UC Berkeley. "Patients with diabetes, res- piration diseases, and even sleep apnea could use a sen- sor that could be worn anywhere to monitor blood-oxygen levels 24/7." The co-authors on this work are Donggeon Han, Adrien Pierre, Jonathan Ting, Xingchun Wang, and Claire M. Loch- ner of UC Berkeley, and Gianluca Bovo, Nir Yaacobi-Gross, Chris Newsome, and Richard Wilson of Cambridge Display Technology Ltd. (Source: UC Berkeley) A new flexible sensor developed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, can map blood-oxygen levels over large areas of skin, tissue, and organs. The new sensor is made of organic electronics printed on bendable plastic that molds to the contours of the body. It is built of an array of alternating red and near-infrared or- ganic LEDs and organic photodiodes printed on a flexible material. Unlike fingertip oximeters that are rigid and bulky, it can detect blood-oxygen levels at nine points in a grid and be placed anywhere on the skin. It could potentially be used to map oxygenation of skin grafts or look through the skin to monitor oxygen levels in transplanted organs. "After transplantation, surgeons want to measure that all parts of an organ are getting oxygen," said Yasser Khan, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. "If you have one sen- sor, you have to move it around to measure oxygenation at different locations. With an array, you can know right away if there is a point that is not healing properly." "All medical applications that use oxygen monitoring could benefit from a wearable sensor," said Ana Claudia Flexible Sensor Maps Blood-oxygen Levels Anywhere in the Body Figure 2: DxtER, the winning device.