Electronic patches – for each patient
Flexible medical microsensors are becoming more and more
Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaWe are definitely entering the era of smart medical patches!
Following the device developed by Korean researchers, which we wrote about just the other day, scientists from the USA present something similar in the journal Science: the University of Illinois at Urbana and Champaign and Northwestern University (Sheng Xu et al., Soft Microfluidic Assemblies of Sensors, Circuits, and Radios for the Skin).
The idea of medical micro sensors that can be worn constantly has been in the air for a long time, but such sensors must be packed with microelectronics, and you can't just make it flexible. If all the chips are, as usual, on a flat and rigid "board", this is fraught with inconvenience: you can't put such a chip on anywhere.
A group of researchers led by John A. Rogers just describes such an architecture principle that allows you to make a flexible medical chip from a rigid one. In the sensor, which resembles a piece of plaster or a temporary tattoo in size, a complex of sensors, wires and microchannels is assembled, and all this is laid in such an "origami" that the entire structure bends freely and even stretches. Rigid elements are arranged so that mechanical forces do not act on them, but only wires laid in such a way as not to break from such deformations were stretched.
A new flexible electronic patch and its fragment
(photo by John A. Rogers / University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
In addition to the thermosensor and accelerometer, the device carries a signal amplifier, batteries and a radio transmitter – that is, a few physiological parameters can be transmitted immediately to a computer, phone or smartphone, which will receive and analyze them, and all this happens in real time. The researchers attached the sensors to people who wore them around the clock for a week, leading a normal life. And the sensors were successfully tested, and their testers did not feel any inconvenience.
According to the authors of the development, the sensitivity of the sensors in the new "smart patch" is such that it can be used to register heart rhythms (as EEG) and brain waves (as EEG). This is the main advantage of the novelty: its design was created not for specific sensors, but as a general solution applicable to a variety of sensors.
If such sensors also do not cost too much, then, perhaps, along with their analogues, they will be able to make a small revolution in medicine.
Prepared based on the materials of the University of Illinois at Urbana and Champaign:
Off the shelf, on the skin: Stick-on electronic patches for health monitoring.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru07.04.2014