Circuit-free, optoelectronic sensing of electrodermal activities based on photon recycling of a micro-LED

Conventional epidermal electronics integrate multiple power harvesting, signal amplification and data transmission components for wireless biophysical and biochemical signal detection. This paper reports the real-time electrodermal activities can be optically captured using a microscale light-emitting diode (micro-LED), eliminating the need for complicated sensing circuit. Owing to its strong photon-recycling effects, the micro-LED’s photoluminescence (PL) emission exhibits a superlinear dependence on the external resistance. Taking advantage of this unique mechanism, the galvanic skin response (GSR) of a human subject is optically monitored, and it demonstrates that such an optoelectronic sensing technique outperforms a traditional tethered, electrically based GSR sensing circuit, in terms of its footprint, accuracy and sensitivity. This presented optoelectronic sensing approach could establish promising routes to advanced biological sensors.