Research has shown that the wearable tattoo can provide accurate blood alcohol levels in its owner via a mobile phone in just a few minutes.
The key features of the stick-on sweat-alyzer are that it can be placed discreetly on your hand and provides a blood alcohol reading within eight minutes compared to the hours used by other techniques.
The wearable tattoo research was funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, or NIBIB, and was conducted by a team of electrical-computer and nano-engineers at the University of California, San Diego, La Jolla.
Researchers hope the device will help reduce the number of deaths, traffic accidents and violence caused by drinking. And because the device is small and can be worn under a shirt sleeve, it could be useful for people trying to control how much they drink in a night.
The patch, which is designed to look like a tattoo, uses iontophoresis, a technique used to deliver drugs non-invasively. So instead of putting the drug on a person's body, the patch extracts sweat, which then reveals the amount of alcohol.
“It looks like a temporary tattoo, but it’s actually a biosensor patch, embedded with quite flexible wireless components,” explained Dr. Seila Selimovic, director of the NIBIB Program in Tissue Chips. “One component releases a chemical that stimulates sweat into the skin under the patch. Another component detects changes in the electrical current flowing through the sweat produced, which measures alcohol levels and sends them to the user’s mobile phone,” she concluded.
This year, the $200,000 National Institutes of Health's Wearable Biosensor award went to BACtrack for the BACtrack Skyn.
It is claimed that while it offers an accurate reading of alcohol level using sweat, a major drawback compared to breathalyzers is that it cannot produce real-time blood-alcohol levels. BACtrack president Keith Nothacker told Reuters that it takes about 45 minutes for ethanol to pass through the skin, making it a sufficient indication of blood alcohol content.
Dr. Patrick Mercier, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD, and author of a recent publication detailing NIBIB's work, argues that their creation provides the ability to monitor blood alcohol in real time.
Marcier specifically stated that measuring alcohol in sweat has been attempted in the past, but these technologies took two to three hours to produce results, while the wearable tattoo sends our alcohol levels to our smartphone in just eight minutes.
