By Eric Bender

Medical devices designed to be wearable or implantable face one huge design barrier: We humans are softies. Our body tissues are orders of magnitude less stiff than the traditional electromechanical devices that we use to treat or study disease, which can limit the success of those devices. 

Canan Dagdeviren, LG Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, seeks to overcome this barrier by creating novel flexible designs. “We make bulky and boxy electronics into soft, thin, dynamic and elastic electronic forms,” says Dagdeviren, who leads the Conformable Decoders group at MIT Media Lab.