Intelligent bandages

Complex and chronic wound care is a significant, growing cost for health care providers.

Advances in nano-technology are leading to the development of Smart Bandages which monitor how a wound is healing. The bandages, which are printed on 3D printers, use built in nano sensors and 5G wireless data to assess a patient's healing process and transmit that data back to clinicians. Depending on the state of a wound, the Smart bandage can release medications into the wound site in a carefully calibrated sequence. Using real time data from the Smart Bandage, a physician can make immediate decisions on modifying treatments that best respond to the state of the wound site. The Smart Bandage makes customised patient care a viable option for physicians and patients working together along a treatment pathway.

Swansea University's Institute of Life Sciences is responsible for the creation of the Smart Bandage and will be leading trails on local patient populations beginning later this year. The project draw together a number of initiatives which are aimed at creating a 5G hub in Swansea and establishing Wales as an important science and innovation zone in the UK. Additionally, the Welsh Wound Care Centre, which is committed to tackling the ' silent epidemic ' of chronic wound care, will be involved in the trials and in data analysis that accompanies them.

The multi technology approach – 3D printing, nano technology, 5G infrastructure, and bioelectronics will help to keep manufacturing costs down. The Smart Bandage project tests a number of key concepts around innovation, local production, streamlined manufacturing and the impact on the local economy of inward investment in a key sector of the UK economy. A similar product, with dose dependent release profiles, developed by the University of Nebraska, Harvard Medical School and MIT, is being tested in the US market, initially focused on treating chronic wounds associated with diabetes. The combination of customisation and controlled release of medicines could substantially improve or speed up the healing process.

For electronics to be effective in wound dressings, they must be soft and flexible to adapt to the wound environment. Finding the perfect mix of flexibility and toughness is a key challenge but recent advances in biomedical hydrogels have made this flexibility possible. Experiments with robust hydrogels have recently produced promising results. A soft, wet, stretchable hydrogel matrix with temperature sensing abilities that can endure large and cyclical deformation was created at MIT in 2015. The hydrogel contained reservoirs with drug delivery channels which release drugs based on body temperature. Research continues into robust hydrogels. Scientists at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang University, Singapore are experimenting with hydrogels as 'ink' for 3D printers.