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Bandage Feels Your Pain
Wired News Report
3:00 a.m. 2.Apr.99.PST
Smart bandages, with built-in sensors that report if a wound is healing or has become infected, could be on the horizon.
BioKey, an invention shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was granted a patent this week from the US Patent Office. Its smart pads and bandages can be fitted with sensors that detect and monitor a range of clinical factors, including the rate of healing or whether a wound has become infected.
The first smart bandage on the market will likely be a smart eye patch for lazy eye, or amblyopia, a common children's disorder.
Co-developed by Sternberg and Jan-Tjeerd de Faber, an ophthalmologist at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital in the Netherlands, the smart eye patch can alert doctors and providers to whether it is being worn, helping them monitor treatment.
"If the child did take it off, the doctor, the parents, and third-party payers would know it was the case," Sternberg said.
BioKey is preparing to launch clinical tests and hopes the patches will be available within a year, Sternberg said.
The bandages may also perform tests that today require laboratory analysis. They may some day be able to dispense drugs or pain-killers according to the state of the injury, said Edward Sternberg, president of BioKey.
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