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Non-Invasive "Smart Bandage" Detects Bed Sores Before They Are Visible to Doctors

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley and UC San Francisco have created a new smart bandage that uses electrical currents to detect early tissue damage from pressure ulcers, or bed sores, before they can be seen by human eyes – and while recovery is still possible. The researchers exploited the electrical changes that occur when a healthy cell starts dying. They tested the thin, non-invasive bandage on the skin of rats and found that the device was able to detect varying degrees of tissue damage consistently across multiple animals. The smart bandage is fabricated by printing gold electrodes onto a thin piece of plastic. This flexible sensor uses impedance spectroscopy to detect bedsores that are invisible to the naked eye.

Topics:
Data Acquisition Data Acquisition Detectors Diagnostics Electronic Components Electronics & Computers Medical Semiconductors & ICs Sensors

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 (upbeat drums) - We set out to create a type of bandage that could detect when bedsores are forming, before they're fully formed. Before the bedsore is beginning to show itself, even turning the area turning pink or showing maybe that something would happen. We can detect some electrical change in the tissue. This is the electrode array that would

    00:00:24 go on your skin and sort of be part of the bandage. So what you see here is a bunch of little electrodes. Those are the little dots that you see right in the middle, sort of clustered. And, you can see that from each of those electrodes buried underneath are little wires that extend back out to a connector. You can imagine laying this on your skin. What all these little electrodes do

    00:00:46 is their running lots of little bits of current through, between themselves. And so, when you take all that information you can build a map of the state of the bedsore underneath where the bandage is. All of this can be miniaturized into something that would fit into a pen thermometer. Very small, something that could be carried around by a nurse or worked into the wound dressing itself.

    00:01:05 As technology is more and more miniaturized, as we learn more and more about these responses that the body has, we are able to build bandages that are actually very intelligent. So, you can imagine a future, which is very close, where the bandage that you put on, or the dressing that a surgeon or a physician might put on will actually be able to report a lot of interesting information about the progress

    00:01:26 of that wound. (light rock music)