‘Electronic skin’ equipped with memory
Wearable sensor stores and transmits motion data and delivers drugs.
CREDIT: Donghee Son and Jongha Lee
Wearable sensors have until now been unable to store data locally.
Researchers have created a wearable device that is as thin as a temporary tattoo and can store and transmit data about a person’s movements, receive diagnostic information and release drugs into skin.
Similar efforts to develop ‘electronic skin’ abound, but the device is the first that can store information and also deliver medicine — combining patient treatment and monitoring. Its creators, who report their findings today in Nature Nanotechnology, say that the technology could one day aid patients with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease or epilepsy.
The researchers constructed the device by layering a package of stretchable nanomaterials — sensors that detect temperature and motion, resistive RAM for data storage, microheaters and drugs — onto a material that mimics the softness and flexibility of the skin. The result was a sticky patch containing a device roughly 4 centimetres long, 2 cm wide and 0.3 millimetres thick, says study co-author Nanshu Lu, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas in Austin.
“The novelty is really in the integration of the memory device,” says Stéphanie Lacour, an engineer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, who was not involved in the work. No other device can store data locally, she adds.
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