Stick the clinic on your hand
A "smart" patch will monitor your health
Kirill Stasevich, Compulenta
Experts from Seoul National University (South Korea), together with colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin (USA), have created a "smart" patch – a device that monitors the state of the body and secretes medicine in accordance with changing parameters. At the same time, despite the abundance of microelectronics, the device remains flexible and elastic, and externally it does not differ much from a conventional adhesive plaster.
A "smart" patch stuffed with diagnostic nanoelectronics and nanoparticles with medicine.
(Photos of the authors of the work.)
The "smart" patch is only 4 cm long, 2 cm wide and 0.003 mm thick. It is clear that these 0.003 mm, figuratively speaking, are packed with nanotechnology: researchers used silicone nanomembranes to create motion and temperature sensors, gold nanoparticles to store information, silicone drugs. A "smart" patch stuck on the skin monitors muscle activity and records information about it. If the muscles start behaving the wrong way (and to understand this, you need to compare the new data with those stored in memory), the patch releases the medicine contained in the nanoparticles.
To do this, the device heats itself, and special thermal sensors make sure that this heating does not burn the skin.
The development can be used by patients who have movement disorders – one of the main symptoms. For example, it can be epilepsy or Parkinson's syndrome: in both cases, the deterioration of the condition can trigger the prompt release of the drug from the storage in the patch. As a matter of fact, this is not the first attempt to create the most compact device that would monitor the human condition itself and treat it itself. Here is one example of a similar diagnostic system – an epidermal microelectronic device created several years ago at the University of Illinois at Urbana and Champaign (USA). And last year, experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) presented a kind of tattoo vaccine that resolves in the skin for quite a long time and manages to teach the immune system which virus to fight.
However, no one has been able to combine the therapeutic and diagnostic functions so far. And it was this task that South Korean researchers solved: their patch works like a nanoelectronic robot that determines when it's time to inject medicine. Thanks to its flexibility and elasticity, it can be used safely, without fear of damaging fragile electronics. In the future, it would be possible to think about other devices of this kind – for example, those that would monitor the blood sugar levels of diabetics and could supply their body with insulin.
However, there is still one big problem with the "smart" patch. We are talking about its nutrition and the data conversion system from the language of physiological parameters to the language of microelectronics. Although both batteries and data converters are now rapidly being compacted, they are still far from the scale and elasticity of the patch described above. When this problem is solved, the patch will no longer be just a prototype and will be able to enter wide clinical practice.
The results of the study are published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology (Donghee Son et al., Multifunctional wearable devices for diagnosis and therapy of movement disorders).
Prepared based on Nature News: ‘Electronic skin' equipped with memory.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru01.04.2014