With an aim to save more lives of heart patients and athletes, researchers from Purdue University have created a new paper-made wearable ‘smart sticker’ that helps achieve the job along and also lowers medical costs.
The wearable smart sticker can be used for monitoring heart patients’ health from within their homes, rather than going to the hospitals. The sticker is made from cellulose, is biocompatible and breathable for the wearer. The stickers have a serpentine pattern to make the devices as thin and stretchable as the skin. The stickers are said to be barely noticeable to the wearer.
Ramses Martinez Lead Researcher for the stickers, speaking to the news said, “For the first time, we have created wearable electronic devices that someone can easily attach to their skin and are made out of paper to lower the cost of personalized medicine.”
The materials used make the stickers safe and cost efficient as compared to other such products. The Ingredients making up Purdue’s smart stickers’ cost around 5 US cents. Furthermore, the stickers can also be mass-produced by printing and other manufacturing processes that are used to print books at high speed.
The stickers are coated with molecules that repel water, oil, dust and bacteriain order to protect it from water or sweat, according to the study published in ACS Advanced Materials and Interfaces. Furthermore, the scientists hope to use the stickers for monitoring patients’ physical activity and alerting them about possible health risks real-time.
The technology can also be used for other medical surveillance such as for athletes to monitor and log their performance during exercise and swimming. Moreover, because the stickers are biocompatible, they can also be used on implanted internal organs for surveillance and sleep pattern monitoring without causing any adverse reactions.
Martinez speaking about the stickers said, “The low cost of these wearable devices and their compatibility with large-scale manufacturing techniques will enable the quick adoption of these new fully disposable, wearable sensors in a variety of health care applications requiring single-use diagnostic systems.”
