Hydrogel "Band-Aid" Senses Temperature, Lights Up, and Delivers Medicine to the Skin

MIT engineers have designed what may be the Band-Aid of the future: a sticky, stretchy, gel-like material that can incorporate temperature sensors, LED lights, and other electronics, as well as tiny, drug-delivering reservoirs and channels. The 'smart wound dressing' releases medicine in response to changes in skin temperature and can be designed to light up if, say, medicine is running low. When the dressing is applied to a highly flexible area, such as the elbow or knee, it stretches with the body, keeping the embedded electronics functional and intact. The key to the design is a hydrogel matrix, a rubbery material mostly composed of water, designed to bond strongly to surfaces such as gold, titanium, aluminum, silicon, glass, and ceramic.

Transcript

00:00:05 We are developing long term, high-efficacy, interfaces between the human body and electronic devices. Common electronic devices, like this, are mostly hard and dry. On the other hand most of the human tissues are soft and wet which are hydrogels: polymer networks infiltrated with water.

00:00:28 What we and many other groups have developed a very tough and robust hydrogel that can mimic the physiological and mechanical properties of the human body. Like this: they are very, very soft and very, very stretchable. In addition, in this year, we've developed a method to bond various types of electronic

00:00:51 material on hydrogels to form extremely robust adhesion between the electronic material and the hydrogel matrix. For example we demonstrated a smart, hydrogel-based, wound dressing which integrate different types of sensors and drug delivery channels and the reservoirs. When the sensor

00:01:13 senses an abnormal temperature at a certain region of the body the drug delivery channel can automatically deliver a specific type of drug to that location. So we imagine these kind of interfaces, between the human body and the electronic devices, will have many future important applications. For example we

00:01:35 want to explore various types of hydrogel-based implantable devices in the body to form this long-term, high-efficacy, human- electronic interfaces and to avoid side effects.