How much blood is running through your veins, arteries, and
capillaries? To find out, you’d typically need to be motionless. Now a
new wearable device may soon be able to give you that information even
while you’re moving around, doing normal activities. The flexible patch,
which conforms to the skin and uses tiny heat sensors to precisely map
the blood flow beneath the surface, could give doctors a high-resolution
view of this important indicator of health.
The inventors of the new “epidermal electronic” sensor system say it
is ready for use in a clinical setting, specifically for monitoring skin
health, for example in patients who have recently had skin grafts. They
say down the road it may also be possible to use it inside the body. In
a recent demonstration,
the researchers showed that the device can record accurate data from
human subjects about the flow of blood in larger vessels, specifically
veins in the forearm, as well as in the network of tiny vessels near the
surface of the skin.
Compared with state-of-the-art methods for noninvasively measuring
blood flow, which rely on optical systems or ultrasound technology, the
new sensor is much simpler and less expensive, says John Rogers,
one of the inventors and a professor of materials science and
engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. More
importantly, he says, it is much less sensitive to motion thanks to the
way it “intimately laminates” to the skin.
