Scientists create paper-made wearable smart stickers to help save lives

Aiming to save more lives of heart patients and athletes, researchers have created new paper-made wearable ‘smart sticker’ that will do the job along with lowering medical costs.

Researchers from Purdue University have developed a new wearable smart sticker that can be used for monitoring heart patients’ health from within their homes, rather than going to the hospitals.

Primarily made from cellulose, the smart speakers are very cheap to make and are also biocompatible and breathable for the wearer. The stickers are patterned in serpentine shapes for making the devices as thin and stretchable as skin, which makes it barely noticeable for the wearer,  informed Purdue University.

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Lead researcher Ramses Martinez said, “For the first time, we have created wearable electronic devices that someone can easily attach to their skin and are made out of paper to lower the cost of personalized medicine.”

The trait making these stickers more attractive is because of their simpler design and low cost as compared to the complex and expensive traditional production methods and materials for epidermal electronics.

Ingredients making up Purdue’s simpler smart stickers’ cost around 5 US cents to make. The stickers can be mass-produced via printing and other manufacturing processes like those used to print books at high speed.

According to the study published in ACS Advanced Materials and Interfaces, in order to keep it from water or sweat, the stickers are coated with molecules that repel water, oil, dust and bacteria.

The scientists hope to use the stickers for monitoring patients’ physical activity, alerting them about possible health risks they might face in real-time. The technology can also be used for other medical surveillance such as for athletes that use them to monitor and log their performance during exercise and swimming. Moreover, because the stickers are biocompatible, they can be used for being implanted onto the internal organs for surveillance and sleep pattern monitoring without causing any adverse reactions.

“The low cost of these wearable devices and their compatibility with large-scale manufacturing techniques will enable the quick adoption of these new fully disposable, wearable sensors in a variety of health care applications requiring single-use diagnostic systems,” Martinez expressed.