Alejandro Santos Betancourt
PhD Programme: Technologies for Nanosystems, Bioengineering and Energy
Research group: MINOS – Microsystems and Nanotechnologies for Chemical Analysis
Supervisors: Alfonso José Romero Nevado & José Luis Ramírez Falo
Bio
Alejandro Santos Betancourt holds a Diploma Automation Engineer from Technological University of Havana (CUJAE), Cuba, since 2012. From 2012 to 2014 he attended a postgraduate course focused in Pedagogy and Research Activities at CUJAE. Afterwards he obtained his Master Degree at Microelectronics Research Center (CIME-CUJAE), Havana, Cuba in 2017. During his master project he was granted with a full research scholarship sponsored by the "Centro Latinoamericano de Formación Interdiciplinaria" (CELFI) and worked at University of Buenos Aires, Argentina during a few months of 2015. He obtained a proficiency level of English language from Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Language Center, ENES Morelia, Michoacán, México in 2020. He started his PhD in 2022 at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain and his research interests are focused on fabrications techniques related to wearable electronics and printed electronics using flexible substrates. He is also interested in wireless communications, IoT and embedded systems.
Project: Development of wearable electronic devices on a flexible substrate using additive manufacturing methods such as inkjet printing
This research project aims to develop novel wearable devices to monitor fitness and health care. These devices related to human wellbeing are showing a huge growth in the past years and nowadays they are usually attached to smart watches or bracelets. Furthermore, they are limited to physical sensors as accelerometers, and their applications are usually limited to pedometers, pulsometers and so on. In order to change the actual fitness paradigm to a deeply-understanding paradigm of body activity there is a need of collecting data about the environment (ex: pollution and/or air quality) and collecting data from the body (ex: exhaled breath and/or sweat). That is why, this research project also will increase the know-how on low dimensional materials for gas sensing. Designing and building wearable devices using flexible substrates will allow us to attach these devices directly to human skin or embed them in fabrics of specific materials. This could be possible using additive fabrication methods as stencil and quick prototyping method as inkjet printing. Correspondingly, the knowledge acquired in the process will lead to use these methods for developing tailor-made devices for a person-application. In addition, this research will investigate very low consumption devices that even allow working without batteries having the possibility of integrating energy harvesting elements into the wearable device using commercial elements or developing new devices for this purpose.
Outreach activities
- European Researchers' Night 2022: "Detecció i comunicació sense fils en ambients aquàtics".
International secondments
- JLM Innovation GmbH, Tübingen, Germany. 2 months (2022).
- CITEVE, Vila Nova de Famalicao, Portugal. 1 month (2023).
- INANOENERGY, Porto, Portugal. 1 month (2023).
