Once again technology and medicine come together to make our future smooth and simple. Researchers at MIT have designed what they call the "band aid of the future". This potentially revolutionary device includes LED lights and temperature sensors to provide medication directly to the wounded section of the skin.
The product consists of a sticky, stretchy gel-like material called hydrogel matrix, which was designed by MIT professor Xuanhe Zhao. Originally this substance was created to strongly bind to surfaces such as titanium, gold, silicon, glass or ceramic. It is mostly composed of water and by embedding various electronics to it, such as temperature sensors, LED lights, semiconductor chips and conductive wires, researches ended up having this extraordinary band aid.
"Electronics are usually hard and dry, but the human body is soft and wet. These two systems have drastically different properties" commented Xuanhe Zhao. "If you want to put electronics in close contact with the human body for applications such as health care monitoring and drug delivery, it is highly desirable to make the electronic devices soft and stretchable to fit the environment of the human body. That's the motivation for stretchable hydrogel electronics".
This "smart wound dressing" releases medicine in response of temperature change on the wounded part of the skin aid it is designed to light up if the drugs are running low. The MIT team envisions an even brighter future for this device, they say it could deliver tiny electronics into our system, such as glucose sensors and neural probes.
Source: MIT
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