MIT revolutionizes wound dressing: Introducing Stretchable Hydrogel Electronic Smart Bandage

Smart phones, smart tablets, everything’s been levelling up to smarter phase. Even band-aids! Yes, a group of Massachusetts Institute of Techonology (MIT) engineers found a way to smarten and level up the very basic first aid element – wound dressing.

Professor Xuanhe Zhao, associate professor of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, explained in a video, how they’ve revolutionized the normal wound dressing to a higher level.

Together with his team, they have created a stretchable hydrogel wound dressing which can sense changes in skin temperature, lights up and delivers appropriate medicine if the medicine is running low. Moreover, this smart wound dressing is so stretchable that is follows the movement of your skin making sure that the electronics implanted will stay in place and continue to operate effusively.

"It's a very versatile matrix," Hyunwoo Yuk, one of the researcher, says. "The unique capability here is, when a sensor senses something different, like an abnormal increase in temperature, the device can on demand release drugs to that specific location and select a specific drug from one of the reservoirs, which can diffuse in the hydrogel matrix for sustained release over time."

“Electronics are usually hard and dry, but the human body is soft and wet. These two systems have drastically different properties,” Zhao says. “If you want to put electronics in close contact with the human body for applications such as health care monitoring and drug delivery, it is highly desirable to make the electronic devices soft and stretchable to fit the environment of the human body. That’s the motivation for stretchable hydrogel electronics.”

Aside from Zhao and Yuk, members of the MIT team are graduate students Shaoting Lin, German Alberto Parada, postdoc Teng Zhang, Hyunwoo Koo from Samsung Display, and Cunjiang Yu from the University of Houston.

MIT Engineers Make Revolutionary New Band-Aids
MIT engineers are taking Band-Aids to the next level.
Posted by AJ+ on Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Source: http://meche.mit.edu/news-media/stretchable-hydrogel-electronics