REAL LIFE NEWS: BANDAGES TO MONITOR YOUR HEALING
by Hazed
The Star seems to be full of stories lately about new ways to use remote sensors. Well, as I continue my attempt to catch up with past issues of New Scientist magazine, I’ve found a really exciting project: bandages that contain sensors to monitor your vital signs.
The Bioscope project is creating bandages that can monitor a hospital patient’s temperature, heart rate, movement and bodily noises. (I love the idea of nurses monitoring a patient’s burps and farts!) The data is transmitted wirelessly to a computer. This means their health can be tracked and basic diagnoses made remotely.
The bandages have a sensor housing printed on them using 3D printing. Nurses can then attach sensors that monitor different things to the housing, swapping them in and out as necessary depending on what they want to keep an eye on.
As well as allowing nurses to keep track of patients’ progress while in hospital, the system could monitor people after they are discharged and sent home, sending information back to the hospital or to the patient’s GP.
It has been developed by an alliance of nurses, engineers and computer scientists at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, and will be presented at a conference in Seattle next month.
