The ‘smart bandage’ that could disinfect and heal your wound for you

Researchers have designed a ‘smart bandage’ with the ability to monitor, disinfect and stimulate healing in chronic wounds.

In a recent study published in Science Advances, researchers have developed a ‘smart bandage’ with the ability to monitor wound healing. This wearable bioelectronic system can do it all: deliver medicine to wounds, stimulate tissue regeneration, provide antimicrobial treatment and monitor wound conditions.

Chances are that you will have fallen over and injured yourself enough to draw blood at least once in your lifetime. And chances are that you also have tried to keep the wound as clean as possible, gone through a seemingly endless number of plasters and still ended up with a scar? Wouldn’t it be so convenient to just whack a bandage on that monitors, disinfects and heals your wound for you? Now, this kind of ‘smart bandage’ might just exist…

Chronic wounds are those that fail to heal within an expected timeframe and are characterized by extended periods of inflammation. This impaired healing leads to greater incidence of infection and morbidity, potentially resulting in limb amputation. In the US, more than 6 million individuals suffer from chronic wounds, such as burns, nonhealing or infected surgical wounds, diabetic ulcers and venous ulcers, costing the health care system an extortionate ~USD $25 billion every year.

Despite being an important clinical problem and financial burden, current treatments for chronic wounds are lacking and often exacerbate the wound.

However, now with this novel ‘smart bandage’, researchers hope that chronic wound healing will become significantly cheaper and more effective. The bandage consists of a flexible and stretchable polymer that can adhere to skin, a stimulus-responsive hydrogel that can deliver antibiotics or other drugs directly to the wound, and electrodes that control drug release and electrical stimulation. The bandage also contains a biosensor array that monitors important wound biomarkers in real-time such as pH, temperature, uric acid, glucose and lactate, which may indicate signs of inflammation or bacterial infection.

But that’s not all. The bandage also sends data to a close by phone, tablet or computer so that the wound condition can be evaluated by the patient or clinician. Furthermore, this device can also encourage tissue growth and quicker healing through low-level electrical stimulation of the wound.

When testing the smart bandages in mice under laboratory conditions, the researchers discovered that mice treated with smart bandages and electrical stimulation had substantially higher rates of wound closure and less scarring compared to mice in the untreated control group.

Although the device has only been tested in animal models, the results are promising. “We have shown this proof-of-concept in small animal models, but down the road, we would like to increase the stability of the device [and] also test it on larger chronic wounds because the wound parameters and microenvironment may vary from site to site,” study author Wei Gao, an assistant professor of Medical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (CA, USA), reflected.

The researchers hope that the smart bandage could be in clinics in the next five to ten years. Future research will test the device on humans and aim to further develop this technology.