Wearable Technology: Better Biosensors for Wound Healing

Researchers at Binghamton University’s Intimately Bio-Integrated Biosensors lab have developed a skin-inspired, open-mesh electromechanical sensor that is capable of monitoring lactate and oxygen on the skin. The development team was under the direction of Ahyeon Koh, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, and included doctoral, masters, and undergraduate students at SUNY Binghamton. PhD student Matthew Brown commented, “This topic was interesting to us because we were very interested in real-time, on-site evaluation of wound healing progress in a near future. Both lactate and oxygen are critical biomarkers to access wound-healing progression.” A paper detailing the work was published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Biosensors are analytical devices that combine a biological component with a physiochemical detector to observe and analyze a chemical substance and its reaction in the body. The team’s work represents an advance over conventional biosensor technology with a similar structure to the micro architecture of the skin. The objective is to realize a sensor that can meld with the body’s structure to better understand chemical and physiological information. Dr. Koh remarked, “The bio-mimicry structured sensor platform allows free mass transfer between biological tissue and bio-interfaced electronics. Therefore, this intimately bio-integrated sensing system is capable of determining critical biochemical events while being invisible to the biological system or not evoking an inflammatory response.”

Read about the advance in wound care.

The journal abstract may be read here.