Wearable Displays and Their Bio-medical Applications

Abstract

Advances in form factors of displays have been originated from the customer's great need for advanced displays with outstanding convenience and accessibility. Accordingly, the form-factors are gradually developing in a direction that is closer to humans, and numerous studies on displays with the new form-factors and their various applications are occurring. Here, I will introduce textile displays that can be truly worn (i.e. wearing displays) and attachable free-form displays for bio/medical applications, as one of the most ultimate next-generation form-factor that can be used to reach people more easily. The proposed textile displays, based on the novel approaches consisting of the fabric and fiber-based strategies using organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), exhibit the natural flexibility of daily clothes which can cope with the curvatures induced by the human body as well as the outstanding optoelectronic performance comparable to conventional displays, demonstrating the great potential which can provide informational hyper-connections. The challenges and strategies for solving them will be introduced in more detail. Furthermore, beyond the role of the conventional information displays, I will talk about how to realize the OLED phototherapy platform capable of photobiomodulation (PBM) and photodynamic therapy (PDT), including the fact that red and NIR OLEDs, which can deeply penetrate human skin, were fabricated in the form of a band-type platform which enables to provide not only low driving voltages (at the level of a few voltages) and high radiant emittance (up to 100 mW/cm2) but also uniform irradiation. In addition to the verified the phototherapy effect of the OLED band type platform, it will be discussed that how to achieve conformability and spatial adaptivity to the human body. As the solution to achieve these essential components, the structural approaches including the sandwich-structured OLEDs (STOLEDs) as well as the OLED band type platforms will be presented.