An elastic water-based bandage created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers senses temperature, lights up, and delivers medicine to the skin. The stretchy hydrogel can be embedded with various electronics.

A new stretchy hydrogel can be embedded with various electronics.
(Credit: Melanie Gonick/MIT)

The "smart" wound dressing releases medicine in response to changes in skin temperature and can be designed to illuminate if medicine is running low, for example.

The hydrogel sheet is bonded to a matrix of polymer islands that encapsulates electronic components such as semiconductor chips, LED lights, and temperature sensors. The rubbery material, mostly composed of water, is designed to join strongly to surfaces such as gold, titanium, aluminum, silicon, glass, and ceramic.

Electronics coated in hydrogel may be used not just on the surface of the skin but also inside the body, for example as implanted, biocompatible glucose sensors, or even soft, compliant neural probes.

The soft, stretchy materials have a stiffness of 10 to 100 kilopascals — about the range of human soft tissues.

Additional pathways were created for drugs to flow through the hydrogel, by either inserting patterned tubes or drilling tiny holes through the matrix. The MIT engineers placed the dressing over various regions of the body and found that, even when highly stretched, the dressing continued to monitor skin temperature and release drugs according to the sensor readings.

An immediate application of the technology, the researchers say, may be as a stretchable, on-demand treatment for burns or other skin conditions.

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