Our team’s recent Nature paper quantifies the global environmental footprint of wearable healthcare electronics as these technologies scale worldwide.
The study integrates life-cycle assessment with market diffusion modeling to evaluate carbon emissions, toxicity, and e-waste associated with devices such as continuous glucose monitors, wearable ECG sensors, blood-pressure monitors, and ultrasound patches. Results show that printed circuit boards and integrated circuits, rather than plastics, dominate environmental impacts, accounting for roughly 70% of total carbon emissions. The analysis projects that global demand for wearable healthcare electronics could increase more than 40-fold by 2050, approaching 2 billion devices annually. Effective mitigation strategies are identified, including critical-metal substitution in electronic circuits, modular device architectures to extend component lifetimes, and low-carbon electricity for manufacturing.
This work highlights the importance of systems-level sustainability assessment for emerging digital health technologies and provides quantitative guidance for responsible design and deployment at scale.