University of Illinois Electronic Skin is perfect for medical diagnostics. (via University of Illinois)
Wearable computing has gained momentum since the beginning of the 21st century with companies like Google, Sony and Apple bringing augmented reality glasses and smart-watches to the commercial markets annually. Even the medical industry is manufacturing devices patients can wear to monitor their health, such as the iPhone ECG from AliveCor that turns the smartphone into an electrocardiogram. Those wearable devices however, can be bulky or intrusive, which makes them uncomfortable to wear.
Engineers from the University of Illinois (Champaign) have designed a solution to those issues while still maintaining functionality with their flexible Electronic Skin. Think of it as a kind of temporary tattoo that monitors user’s vitals that wrinkles and stretches along with the skin without becoming damaged. The researchers embedded just about everything they could to the flexible substrate including sensors, transistors, frequency capacitors, wireless antennas and even solar cells to power the patch. The electronic circuits are applied directly to the flexible substrate, which is then mounted to a thin sheet of water-soluble plastic that can be applied to the skin in much the same fashion as temporary tattoos. Scientists have demonstrated a host of practical uses for Electronic Skin over the past several years since it was designed (back in 2011) such as monitoring neural activity without wearing motion-restrictive headgear, which is especially good for neonatal applications for newborn babies.
Surgical wounds are another promising application as the patches can be used to monitor temperature changes near the wound that could lead to infection or for monitoring how fast the wounds heal through moisture levels. The E-Skin could be outfitted with motion sensors to monitor patients that have motor neuron diseases such as primary lateral sclerosis to see how they respond to new treatments or allow them to interact with computers (like Stephen Hawking).
Drug intake could also benefit from the patch by monitoring dosage levels or actually used to deliver correct dosages for patients that have memory difficulties such as Alzheimer’s disease. They could also be applied surgically to internal organs for various applications. For example, they could be enlarged and grafted to the heart to monitor cardiac activity or even function as a low-power pacemaker or act as an internal defibrillator.
While there is indeed a wide range of applications that the Electronic Skin could be used for, it does have one drawback in that it only lasts a few days before becoming worn out, and that’s if you have kept it out of soapy water just like a temporary tattoo. The researchers are currently looking for ways to extend the life span of their E-Skin without the degradation of the electronic circuitry so that they could be worn for months at a time.
They are also looking into adding new components to the patches such as Wi-Fi modules that could connect to the internet to send and receive data remotely. They also want to adapt micro-piezoelectric devices into the patches circuitry to power them through the user’s body movements, which would negate the need for batteries for long-term applications. No matter how you look at it, flexible electronic circuitry is not only revolutionizing the future of medical care but will incorporated into everything from flexible smartphones to curved high-resolution displays and everything in between.
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