So many companies are developing electronic skin patches that can monitor your health that it’s become as passé as smart watches. But the electronic skin patch developed by researchers at Seoul National University has a few more tricks than simply monitoring your vital signs: this patch can actually treat Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and heart failure, by tracking muscle movement and other data to decide if and when to deliver medicine right through your skin.
Yeah, that was my reaction too.
Developed by chemical and biological engineering professorDae-Hyeong Kim and his team at Seoul National University, the creation is the very first electronic skin patch that can not only monitor and store data about your health, but also administer drugs. According to Kim and his team, who reported the design in Nature Nanotechnology , the patch’s “ closed-loop feedback system” uses its stored data for statistical pattern analysis, which it then uses to track users’ symptoms and drug response.
The “wearable health-monitoring device” is a system of sensors, memory, and drug-delivering components, all of which were made from nanomaterials. Kim and his team integrated this system onto an incredibly flexible polymer substrate, allowing the patch to be bent and twisted any which way. It also allows the patch to work even when stretched to 125% of its original length. Even after 1,000 cycles of stretching.
Patch can deliver medicine right to you, right when you need it, to stop seizures, Parkinson tremors, or heart attacks.
The top layer of the polymer is printed with silicon nanomembrane strain sensors—capable of detecting the muscle tremors caused by Parkinson’s, for example—as well as serpentine chromium and gold nanowires, which act as both heaters and temperature sensors in order to control the medicine’s diffusion into the skin, and drug-loaded porous silica nanoparticles.
In order to achieve the patch’s frankly awe-inspiring level of stretchable memory, Kim’s team wedged three layers of gold nanoparticles between super-thin titanium oxide nanomembranes, printed on aluminum electrodes.
According to the researchers, all that’s needed to make this a wearable, wireless patch available to the public is the addition of some kind of battery or wireless power transmission.
All of this means that Kim’s patch, once placed on skin, measures your muscle movement and other vitals, and can use those signs to know when to release drugs into your system without any external sensors.
Electronic skin may not be big news anymore, but electronic skin capable of saving your life certainly is.
Source Discovery
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