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Scientists have developed a small, soft patch that can be placed on people’s skin – and read a lot of information about their body.
The patch is about the size of a postage stamp, but is able to provide information about their vital signs and even determine what they have been drinking or eating, the researchers say.
In addition to constantly monitoring their blood pressure and heart rate, it can also see the amount of glucose, lactate, alcohol or caffeine in their blood, scientists say.
As such, it represents a major advancement in wearable technology, which aims to measure data about a person’s body and use it to improve their health and fitness.
It could also be used on patients who might otherwise be difficult to follow, the researchers said, including children.
“This type of laptop would be very useful for people with underlying medical conditions to monitor their own health on a regular basis,” said Lu Yin, a PhD in nanotechnology. UC San Diego student and co-first author of a new study detailing the research needed to make the patch.
“It would also be a great tool for remote monitoring of patients, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when people minimize in-person clinic visits.
Existing sensors – which are built into consumer devices like Apple watches – are able to monitor people’s heart rates and the amount of oxygen in their blood. More specialized devices allow more specific monitoring, such as glucose levels in people with diabetes.
But researchers say the new patch does all of this at once – and does it without the invasive and potentially disturbing procedures needed to do it, which can include placing catheters deep into people’s arteries.
While all of the sensors are in the patch, it requires highly specialized engineering for each of its different readings. To detect lactate, caffeine, and alcohol, for example, the patch releases a drug into the skin to make it sweat, and then examines the sweat itself for chemicals.
While all of this technology was incorporated into the small patch, in tests that included alcohol consumption and exercise, it worked as well as specialized equipment such as blood pressure cuffs and breathalysers, the researchers say.
The new research is the result of two different efforts at the UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors. He combines work to develop new portable devices capable of monitoring a multitude of different signals at once, looking at everything from chemical changes to electrophysiological changes; which was combined with separate work that sought to create soft, stretchy patches that can go over the skin and monitor blood pressure inside the body.
The new study, published in Biomedical engineering of nature, combines these two efforts to create a patch that can be easily stuck to the skin while gathering a host of different information, the researchers say.
Now they are hoping they can add more sensors, including giving the patch the ability to detect certain diseases. They also hope to make the sensor smaller and allow it to be disconnected from the power source and display necessary for it to function, with the goal of creating a “fully portable complete system.”
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