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Pricking your fingers to check sugar levels might become a thing of the past for diabetics thanks to two University of California San Diego alumni – scientists both, whose startup business may completely transform the way people monitor their glucose. 

For more than a decade, Forbes has highlighted young scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs with the help of nominations from the public. To be considered for this year’s list, all candidates had to be under the age of 30 as of December 31, 2023, and never before named to a 30 Under 30 North America, Europe or Asia list. 

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), are using a styrene-based triblock copolymer to help enable the development of a wearabl ultrasound patch that could offer real time heart scans on the go. The material, a styrene-ethylene0-butylene-styrene (SEBS) thermoplastic elastomer, helps to make the patch softer, more compliant and inherently stretchable.

Call it the electric T-shirt. Or, as the researchers at the University of California San Diego have dubbed it, the “wearable microgrid”. Whatever its nickname, the long-sleeve shirt designed by the brainiacs at the Jacobs School of Engineering can harvest and store energy while the wearer is moving or exercising. The school’s nanoengineers anticipate that someday the prototype will be refined to the point where electronic devices like cellphones won’t have to rely on the electric grid for power but can run on the articles of clothing people wear every day.

The small beads of sweat your fingertips produce while you sleep could power wearable sensors that measure glucose, vitamin C, or other health indicators. That's the promise of a new advance—a thin, flexible device that wraps around fingertips like a Band-Aid—that its creators say is the most efficient sweat-powered energy harvester yet.

 Wearables are so hot right now, with consumers scooping up more than 100 million units of smartwatches, fitness trackers, augmented reality glasses, and similar tech in the first quarter of 2021 alone. Sales in the category increased 34.4 percent in the second quarter from Q2 2020, making it one of the fastest-growing categories of personal electronics. 

In 2018, Seismic launched its apparal line powered by discreet robotics to support the body’s core and function like an extra set of muscles. Their Seismic suit gives 30 watts of power to each hip and lower back to support sitting, standing, lifting and other activities. The California-based startup has $23M in funding. A paper published in Nature Communications on March 9, 2020, highlighted a new wearable microgrid that would potentially allow the human body to power small gadgets.

Engineers have developed a stretchy skin patch for the neck that provides all-in-one health monitoring capabilities.The innovation can track blood pressure, heart rate and measure glucose levels, but is the first to monitor cardiovascular signals and biochemical levels. Designed by the University of California (UC) San Diego, the soft patch is a thin sheet of stretchy polymers and fitted with blood pressure and chemical sensors.

esearchers have developed a way to make high-power, flexible, and stretchable batteries by the dozens using a screen-printing technique much like that used for printing T-shirts. The method lets them make silver–zinc batteries, which are based on a decades-old chemistry, in any shape and size, and it paves the way for manufacturing rolls of the batteries quickly at low cost.

Chemical engineering researcher-turned-entrepreneur Lu Yin isn’t the kind of arresting public speaker who can blow anyone away with his charisma or magnetism. That mattered little on Friday, when Yin, 22, pitched his battery tech company, Ocella, to a panel of judges in the semi-final portion of San Diego’s Quick Pitch Competition.