Beast Tech | Electronic Tattoo's Changing the Future of Healthcare?

A tiny, bendy circuit, the same thickness as a thousandth of the width of a human hair, printed on silicon. Stuck onto your skin, it could deliver drugs directly to an area and then dissolve harmlessly or be rubbed away anything from minutes to months after initial application. Worn like a child’s temporary tattoo, these ‘Biostamps’ are the future of human monitoring. 

Worn like a child’s temporary tattoo, these ‘Biostamps’ are the future of human monitoring.

Biostamps can measure a variety of physiological functions: data from the brain, muscles and heart, including body temperature, UV exposure, hydration levels, tremors and more. Real-time data collection and big data analysis allows for all of these functions to be picked up by the epidermal electronics and collated.

To sense tremors, biostamps use strain gauges in the circuit and the silicon. For example, those suffering from Parkinson’s disease could wear a biostamp that can monitor, measure and collect their tremor data for later review. This data will not only be useful to the doctors treating the patients but also by scientists studying the disease itself. Biostamps are virtually unnoticeable by the wearer which is a huge advantage as currently, patients have to wear intrusive monitoring devices or use clunky appliances.

For the biostamp to release drugs, it’s a little more complicated. The drugs are held inside nanoparticles within the circuit and heating elements are used to release them. Although this technology is a good few years away from being used on the general public, it has successfully been able to release a dye on a patch of pig skin in new trials.

The benefits biostamps offer to patients and the field of medicine are unlimited.

The benefits biostamps offer to patients and the field of medicine are unlimited. Because doctors can amass vast amounts of real-time information about the neuromuscular and cardiovascular processes of each individual patient, they can provide personalised healthcare, diagnostics and therapy. People tend to recover better at home so patients can be discharged from hospital earlier as they can be monitored remotely. The drugs within the biostamp can be programed to release at specified times which can help heal wounds post-op both internally and externally.

Information gathered though the use of biostamps could allow people to make proactive health choices prevent future problems before it is too late. Monitoring babies in the womb and revolutionising drug trials as drug compatibility can be monitored to a much higher level could be seen in the future. Critical health care is costly and risky but with this technology, the eventualities of patient’s health will be easier to predict.

Insights that biostamps provide have the potential to empower medicine and change current treatments for the better. The focus is not on how we can make computers more human or making humans more high-tech, but how we can use this technologywith our bodies to improve our lives.

source