Scientists have developed a small, soft patch that can be placed on skin and gather various information about their bodies. The patch, which is barely the size of a postage stamp, is able to provide information about people's vital signs, as well as process what they have drunk or eaten, according to the researchers.
Scientists claim that in addition to continuously monitoring blood pressure and heart rate, the patch can also see how much glucose, lactate, alcohol or caffeine is in a person's blood.
For this very reason, it is a significant breakthrough in wearable technology, which aims to measure data about a person's body and use it to improve their health and fitness.
Another very important feature is that this patch could also be used on patients who would otherwise be difficult to identify, including children.
Lu Yin, a PhD student in nanoengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored a new study detailing the research needed for the patch, said this type of wearable would be very useful in helping people with underlying medical conditions monitor their health on a regular basis. He added that the patch would also serve as a great tool for remote patient monitoring, especially during the COVID-19 when people are limited in their travel and clinic visits.
Existing sensors — which are built into consumer deviceslike Apple Watches — can monitor people's heart rate and the amount of oxygen in their blood. More specialized devices allow for more specific monitoring, such as glucose levels in people with diabetes.
Scientists claim that the new body-worn patch allows for all of this at once – and does so without the invasive and potentially embarrassing procedures required under other conditions, such as placing catheters deep inside people's arteries.
While all the sensors are concentrated in the patch, it requires very specialized engineering for each of its different readings. To sense lactate, caffeine, and alcohol, for example, the patch releases a drug into the skin to make it sweat, and then tests the sweat itself for chemicals.
Despite all this technology being integrated into the small patch that can collect information about a person's body, in tests involving alcohol consumption and exercise, it performed just like specialized equipment such as blood pressure cuffs and ventilators, the researchers report.
This new research is the result of two separate efforts at the UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors. It combines work on developing new wearables that can monitor a range of different signals simultaneously, tracking everything from chemical to electrophysiological changes, with other work that looked at creating soft, flexible patches that can be placed on the skin and monitor a person's blood pressure.
The new study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, combines these two efforts with the goal of creating a patch that can easily stick to the skin and collect various information.
The scientists hope to add more sensors, including the ability for the patch to detect certain diseases. They also aim to make the sensor smaller and make it possible to disconnect it from the power source and display needed for its operation. If they succeed, they will make the patch a complete wearable system.
