Smart Face Masks Could Use Bioactive Inks to Monitor Body and Environment
Researchers at Tufts University have created biomaterial-based inks that respond to chemicals released from the body (like sweat) or in the surrounding environment, by changing color. The inks can be screen-printed onto textiles like clothes, shoes, and face masks. They can be printed in complex patterns and at high resolution, providing a detailed map of human response or exposure. The advance could detect and quantify a range of biological conditions, molecules and, possibly, pathogens over the surface of the body. The components that make the sensing garments possible are biologically activated, silk-based inks. The soluble silk substrate in these ink formulations can be modified by embedding “reporter” molecules – such as pH-sensitive indicators, or enzymes like lactate oxidase to indicate levels of lactate in sweat.
Transcript
00:00:01 [Music] color sensors are very simple and very coarse on their own but the moment that you duplicate them in the moment that you distribute them they give an accurate reading of what is happening in a complex context like your body there are two components to this as one is to have all of these active inks that can be printed on a large scale on a
00:00:34 shirt tapestry painted on the walls etc and these biologically active inks will change color what these colors do is that they provide a continuous painting that updates and changes its response as a function of the athletes progression through exercise the idea is that we use three different color metric guys that they switch color in different pH ranges in a way that we can actually build a
00:01:03 color map of what's happening in the body okay I'm gonna spray pH three and now I'm gonna spray pH eight on this area by having a simple color change in the different areas variable in real time to the tattoo is happening actually in our sweat and correlate that information to what's happening inside our body so by looking at analyzing the local
00:01:28 color change in each of the areas and comparing them to a database of spectral signatures that one has one can reconstruct a lot of information about the content in sweat whether it's ions whether it's the presence of lactic acid for fatigue having localized temperature measurements and so forth I think that the advantages are that you can tailor the training depending on your body's
00:01:51 response you know when to stop you know if there is an affected area of your body that needs more attention than others and and these colors can reflect the health of a person the vitality of the person the mood the the well-being of communities color sensors are looking inwards and so they take what the body puts out and then they react to it but they also look outwards so they react
00:02:14 also to what comes from the environment so if you go beyond the human body and you go and you think about putting these inks on turns or tapestries than the tapestries and the curtains will change color in response to the changing environment around them the fact that we have these living materials and we have these living inks means that we can turn
00:02:36 anything into a sensor if you can embed life and you can embed chemistry's in ordinary objects the ordinary objects become communicators of the world changing around us [Music] you [Music]