Speaker: Kean C. Aw
Time: July 13 15:00-16:00, 2023
Venue: The second lecture hall of Conference Center, East Campus
Abstract:Soft and wearable sensors are gaining attention, especially in health-related applications. For example, patients recovering from injuries, surgeries or stroke require rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is arduous and expensive, requiring a large amount of resources. A personal digital system where rehabilitation progress can be digitised, analysed, and tracked will mitigate these shortcomings. With the development of our soft, flexible, and stretchable sensors that can measure movement and pressure, truly wearable braces for the joints such as the elbow, knee and ankle that are comfortable to wear that can provide real-time monitoring of unimpeded movement of the limbs and walking gait, providing “true” rehabilitation feedback is possible. It can also be adopted into other medical applications, such as wearable chest bands for breathing monitoring. This presentation will share some of our work on soft sensors based on piezoresistive and capacitive transductions.
Biography: Associate Professor Kean C. Aw received Engineering Council (UK) in electrical and electronics engineering from Tunku Abdul Rahman College, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1986, the M.Sc. degree in advanced manufacturing systems from Brunel University, London,
U.K., in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree in applied physics from the University of Science, Penang, Malaysia, in 2002.
He joins the University of Auckland in 2004 and is currently the Deputy Head of Department (Research) in the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering. Prior to his academic position, he worked at Intel, Altera, and Navman for a total of 11 years. His main interests are in micro systems and deployment of smart/functional materials and structures such as conducting polymers, carbon-based materials, etc., as sensors and actuators in various applications such as biosensors, medical/rehabilitation robots, micropumps, micromanipulators, MEMS, energy harvester, etc. He has more than 200 refereed publications.