Professor Huichan Zhao, Tsinghua University answers our questions about their work and Cambridge University Press’s new journal Wearable Technologies

What first attracted you to the field of wearable technologies?.

I first heard about “wearable technologies” from my PhD advisor. The first passion  about this technology is that it can directly transform the technologies we study in the lab to the improvement of our quality of life.

What are you currently working on that you’d like to tell us about?

My main research interests include artificial muscles, stretchable sensors, and novel soft robotics applications. When artificial muscles are wearable, they can generate biomimetic touch on human skin to transmit information and emotions; when stretchable sensors are made wearable, they can collect human movements, sounds, and physiological signals.

What are some of the challenges facing the field today?

From my point of view, wearable technologies require actuators, sensors, and controllers that are very unconventional. They need to be compliant, robust, and of low energy cost and very few on-the-shelf components meet those high demands.

Why should authors publish in Wearable Technologies?

Wearable Technologies is the first journal that specifies wearables. Wearables are of interest of both the academia and the industry and I believe this journal will be a distribution center of such a fast-growing field in the near future.