Eco-friendly wearable sensors that heal themselves
Think of a typical band-aid—or plaster, depending on where in the world you’re reading from.
When you put one of these simple medical adhesives on a curved area of your body, things often get annoying. The adhesive doesn’t quite stretch how it should. It’s unwieldy and gets stuck to itself. It rips. And so, you throw it away and get a new one.
When it comes to wearable sensors, addressing the challenge of placing tiny electronics in something akin to a band-aid is hard enough. But what about solving all of the above issues?
The story: A team from Korea University Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology (KU-KIST) has developed flexible conductor materials that address all of these challenges.
- These elastic materials go beyond the physical capabilities of wearable sensors or smart bandages we’ve excitedly covered before.
- The conductor is biocompatible and stretchable up to 500x without the brittleness and incompatibility with electronics of other stretchable materials.
- It’s also self-healing and biodegradable, resulting in less waste with each use.
The future of remote patient monitoring: The materials aren’t being made into a specific sensor patch yet, but the possibilities imagined by the team and other experts are endless. Here are a few examples of what the flexible conductors could be made into:
- A smart patch that measures motion, temperature, and other vital signs from the skin surface.
- An implantable sensor patch used inside the body, even on internal organs.
- An internal monitoring sensor placed at a surgical site that degrades over time as it reports on healing, eliminating the need for a follow-up surgery to remove it.
Why this matters: Sustainability is a great concern for medtech. Researchers are taking medtech products to a sustainable new age by developing materials effective across multiple uses which don't end their life cycle as waste.