Mahmoud Tavakoli, Director of the “Soft and Printed Microelectronics Laboratory” (SPM) from the Faculty of Science and Technology of Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC), featured in a recent Nature article “Where I Work”.
In the piece “How I make stretchy electronics for medicine”, Tavakoli offers an overview of the work being developed at the SPM Lab focusing on the development of a new generation of wearable electronic devices that mimic the flexibility of the human skin, with potential applications in different sectors, namely healthcare.
“We are working on a soft electronic device that can monitor internal organs. Standard electronic devices are rigid and invasive. But a soft, miniature robot might be able to move inside the gut to film, register data or deliver drugs without harming tissue”, explained the researcher to Nature.
Image Credits: Ana Paganini for Nature
Mahmoud Tavakoli manages a multi-disciplinary research team of Electrical, Chemical, Biomedical and Mechanical Engineers that combines expertise in nanomaterials, polymers, and liquid conductors to drive applications in soft robotics, soft electronics, smart textile, smart plastics, and health monitoring.
“We’re a team of 15 researchers in different fields such as electronic, chemical or mechanical engineering and physics. We even have a digital artist. My job is to glue all this expertise into one unit.”, shared Mahmoud.
Tavakoli’s research work has received substantial support by the CMU Portugal Program and Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT). Through the Program, the FCTUC team has collaborated with the Soft Machines Lab from Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering on several impactful projects: Stretchtonics, one of CMU Portugal Entrepreneurial Research Initiatives; WoW, one of our Large Scale Collaborative Projects which is led by Glintt; and the Exploratory research project Exoskins. At the moment, the team oversees the supervision of CMU Portugal Dual Degree Ph.D. students supervised by Mahmoud Tavakoli: Manuel Carneiro and Marta Freitas.
The research developed under these collaborative projects, with the support of teams at Carnegie Mellon and CMU Portugal students, has contributed to significant advancements in stretchable electronics, wearable computing, wearable patient monitoring, digital health, and digital biomarkers.
To read the full story, visit Nature here.
