University of California San Diego engineers have developed a skin patch that can be worn on the neck to track blood pressure and heart rate while monitoring the user’s glucose, lactate, alcohol or caffeine levels.
“Intertwined with concepts of telehealth, the Internet of medical things, and precision medicine, wearable sensors offer features to actively and remotely monitor physiological parameters,” wrote the research team in a study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering this week.
“Wearable sensors can generate data continuously, without causing any discomfort or interruptions to daily activity, thus enhancing the self-monitoring compliance of the wearer and improving the quality of patient care,” they continued.
WHY IT MATTERS
According to the university, the engineers’ device is the first to monitor cardiovascular signals at the same time as multiple biochemical levels in the human body.
“The novelty here is that we take completely different sensors and merge them together on a single small platform as small as a stamp,” said Joseph Wang, a professor of nanoengineering at UC San Diego and co-corresponding author of the study, in a statement.
“We can collect so much information with this one wearable, and do so in a noninvasive way, without causing discomfort or interruptions to daily activity.”
