New bandages could monitor your recovery

We love wearables here at shinyshiny, but they’re not all about tracking your fitness or giving you supersonic hearing. In future, they could help hospital patients to receive personalised care.

The National Taiwan University in Taipei is now working on a project called Bioscope, developing bandages that can monitor patients’ temperature, heart rate, movement, and other vital stats, wirelessly transmitting the data to a computer for doctors to analyse and if necessary, act upon.

The bandages come with a built-in thermometer, accelerometer, and sensors which measure electrical activity. They can even include a small microphone to track the sound patterns of internal organs to help detect disease. Because the area holding the sensor modules is 3D-printed onto the bandage, sensors can easily be added or changed as necessary.

A team of engineers, computer scientists, and nurses have worked on the system together and hope that in future it will allow medical staff to continue to monitor patients after they leave hospital, as well as opening up the possibilities for remote diagnoses. They will present their work so far at the UbiComp conference in Seattle this September.

Image via Brian Snelson’s Flickr.