Health: Towards wound dressings for chronic wounds?

What if technology helped us treat some chronic wounds? This is the ambitious bet that are given researchers at Tuft University, located in Mbadachusetts. The latter have indeed unveiled a prototype of intelligent dressing capable of covering a wound while administering a treatment at regular intervals.

Their work was published on July 6th in the journal Small. The newspaper recalls that this "smart bandage" aims to treat a problem far from being trivial. Chronic wounds remain the leading cause of non-traumatic limb amputations worldwide and "constitute a major health problem and affect the lives of more than 25 million people in the United States."

Find good timing

The researchers realized that care could be more effective provided it was administered in a timely manner. So they created a connected bandage that could track the progress of the injury in real time, and spread the treatment in the right timing.

It has a temperature and pH sensor. The system to release drug doses reacts to stimuli. It is a hydrogel coupled to a small flexible heating device. We also note the presence of a microcontroller, which serves to process the various data received to activate the drug delivery protocol. Sameer Sonkusale, professor of electrical engineering who participated in the study, wanted to clarify the interest of these new devices.

"Flexible electric has made possible many portable medical devices, but bandages have changed little since the beginnings of medicine. We are simply applying modern technology to ancient art, hoping to improve the results of an insoluble problem. "