Emerging Additive Manufacturing Methods for Wearable Sensors: Opportunities to Expand Access to Personalized Health Monitoring

Persistent disparities exist in access to state-of-the-art healthcare disproportionately affecting underserved and vulnerable populations. Advances in wearable sensors enabled by additive manufacturing (AM) offer new opportunities to address such disparities and enhance equitable access advanced diagnostic technologies. Additive manufacturing provides a pathway to rapidly prototype bespoke, multifunctional wearable sensors thereby circumventing existing barriers to innovation for resource-limited settings imposed by the need for specialized facilities, technical expertise, and capital-intensive processes. This review examines recent progress in the additive manufacture of wearable platforms for physiological health monitoring. Supported by an initial overview of relevant techniques, representative examples of 3D printed wearable sensors highlight the potential for measuring clinically-relevant biophysical and biochemical signals of interest. The review concludes with a discussion of the promise and utility of additive manufacturing for wearable sensors, emphasizing opportunities for expanding access to vital healthcare technology and addressing critical health disparities. The review examines recent advances in additive manufacturing techniques that enable rapid prototyping of customized, multifunctional wearable sensors for physiological monitoring. By eliminating traditional barriers to innovation, these technologies promise expanded access to personalized health diagnostics and monitoring, especially for underserved populations. Representative examples of 3D printed wearable sensors highlight the potential for measuring diverse clinically relevant biophysical and biochemical signals. image