Thanks to developments in materials science and the availability of tiny off-the-shelf chip components, it is now possible to create cost-effective, ultra-thin, sophisticated electronics that stick to the skin and move and stretch with it. Scientists and engineers from Illinois describe their design for wireless health-tracking skin patches in the journal Science.

The medical innovation is the work of two teams led by John A. Rogers, a professor at the University of Illinois, and Yonggang Huang, a professor at Northwestern University, who says they designed the device to be able to monitor a person’s health 24/7 without interfering with day-to-day activity.

“It is as soft as human skin and can move with your body, but at the same time it has many different monitoring functions,” Prof. Huang explains. “What is very important about this device is it is wirelessly powered and can send high-quality data about the human body to a computer, in real-time.”

The researchers believe skin-mounted devices offer a clearer picture of what is going on than wristband or clip-on devices, which are not as accurately coupled to the body and are plagued with background noise because they can only measure relative motion.

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Source: Medical News Today.