Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a bandage that releases medicine in response to skin temperature and lights up when the medicine is running low. The smart bandage consists of a stretchy, gel-like material that contains temperature sensors, light-emitting diode (LED) lights, and other electronics, as well as tiny drug-delivery reservoirs and channels.
“Electronics are usually hard and dry, but the human body is soft and wet. These two systems have drastically different properties,” says Xuanhe Zhao, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “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.”
▲ A new stretchy hydrogel can have various embedded electronics. Here, a sheet of hydrogel is bonded to a matrix of polymer islands (red) that can encapsulate electronic components such as semiconductor chips, LED lights, and temperature sensors. Image courtesy of Melanie Gonick, MIT.
At the heart of the bandage is a hydrogel...
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