Wearable electronics are gaining momentum. As our sister site Design News reports, heart monitors could soon become a kind of fashion accessory. 

IMEC already has an ECG necklace, but if you're worried it might not match your outfit, the Belgium-based nanoelectronics firm and others are working on cardiac monitoring devices that are a bit more discreet. The inspiration for their designs is the humble Band-Aid.

"We are indeed moving toward the Band-Aid,"  Julien Penders, program manager for body area networks at Imec, told Design News. "A Band-Aid is very thin and very flexible, so to get there we still need to reduce the size, while making everything more flexible and stretchable. When we can do all that, we'll have a very small ECG product."

But as you'll read, shrinking heart monitors presents problems. Designers of these devices face challenges including a need to lower their power consumption and achieve the necessary distance between electrodes. 

Read the entire article over at Design News.

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