This Smart Wireless Bandage Not Only Monitors Your Wounds, But Treats Them Too
Designed to monitor wounds and deliver electrical stimulation, this smart bandage can cut healing time by 25 percent and scarring in half.
A team of scientists working under the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiative have come up with a "smart bandage" which, they claim, not only allows for wounds to be monitored wirelessly but can actively speed up healing — through the application of electrical stimulation.
"In sealing the wound, the smart bandage protects as it heals," co-first author Yuanwen Jiang explains of the team's work, which is based on the principle of galvanotaxis or the electrical stimulation of wounds. "But it is not a passive tool. It is an active healing device that could transform the standard of care in the treatment of chronic wounds."
The flexible, wearable bandage contains a microcontroller, impedance and temperature sensors, a compact antenna for a built-in radio, and an electrical stimulator — in a circuit measuring just 100 microns, or around the size of a single layer of latex paint, in thickness. This is mounted atop hydrogel which adheres to the wound to protect it from the outside world, yet peels away easily when gently heated under an infrared lamp.
Sealing a wound with a hydrogel bandage isn't new, but it's the electronics which provide the novelty in the team's creation: the sensors actively monitor the wound and respond with electrical stimulation when necessary — something which prior research, backed up by the team's experimental findings, has shown can accelerate wound closure, reduce scarring, and even fight infection, with test subjects healing around 25 percent faster and with 50 percent less scarring.
"With stimulation and sensing in one device, the smart bandage speeds healing, but it also keeps track as the wound is improving," explains co-first author Artem Trotsyuk. "“We think it represents a new modality that will enable new biological discovery and the exploration of previously difficult-to-test hypotheses on the human healing process."
The bandage, however, remains a proof of concept for now — with the team working to increase its size to human scale following lab testing on a murine model, reduce costs, and investigating adding more sensors to improve the data retrieved from the bandage.
The team's work has been published in the journal Nature Biotechnology under closed-access terms.