CKSRI Seminar Series 2026 “Soft Electronics Systems for Haptics, Robotics Sensing and Healthcare"
CKSRI Seminar Series 2026
"Soft Electronics Systems for Haptics, Robotics Sensing and Healthcare"
Date: 25 August 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Venue: LTC, Academic Building, HKUST
Event Format: Seminar, Lecture, Talk
Speaker: Prof. Kuanming YAO
ABSTRACT
In the era of embodied intelligence, advanced robotic “bodies” and AI “brains” are swiftly evolving to empower robots with more capabilities and intelligences. In another way, it is also possible to empower human with advanced capabilities, or awareness to information from either external or internal. For example, human sensory such as vision, auditory, olfactory and especially tactile sensation, can be enhanced or supplemented. Internally, the health condition of the body or internal drug concentration could be precisely sensed and monitored for intelligent personalized healthcare too. The implementation of such “sensory intelligence” and “health intelligence” must rely on a physical interface to directly interact with human body for bi-directional information exchange, which needs to be soft, skin-conformable, and even breathable. This talk will explore the design and application of integrated soft bioelectronic interfaces for actively delivering sensations to users, acquiring the sensory features for personalized feedback, and sensing bio-signals for health condition monitoring, such as cardiovascular activities and metabolic biomarkers. Our research involves advanced materials, electronic designs, fabrication strategies and clinical trials, eventually realized tactile sensory enhancement on users or neuropathy patients, and continuous perioperative wireless cardiac monitoring with high precision and high comfortability. By bridging the gap between biological systems and electronic systems, these innovations are paving the way for next-generation personalized healthcare and sensory enhancement solutions.
About the Speaker
Dr. Kuanming Yao is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD) at HKUST. He is also affiliated with Department of Materials (MAT) and Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute (CKSRI). Before joining HKUST, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 2024 to 2026. He obtained the Ph.D. degree in 2023 and completed a year of postdoctoral training at City University of Hong Kong (CityU), under the supervision of Prof. Xinge Yu. He completed the bachelor’s degree in Energy Engineering in 2019 at Zhejiang University (ZJU).
Dr. Yao’s research interests include wearable and implantable bioelectronic systems, electrochemical sensing and stimulation interfaces, soft electrotactile and human-machine interfaces, etc. He has cumulatively published 70+ journal articles, and serves as the first (including co-first) or corresponding author of 15 top-notch journal articles, including Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Electronics, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Chemical Society Reviews, Matter, etc. He was cited over 6000 times and with an h-index of 46. Dr. Yao has served as invited reviewer for top journals such as Nature, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Sensors, Science Advances, and served as the editorial member of Discover Electronics and BMEMat, guest editor of Biosensors. During his Ph.D., he won the Outstanding Academic Performance Awards (CityU) for three consecutive years, and his thesis won the HKMHDIA Student Research Award (2021-2022).
