Temporary Tattoos May One Day Power Your Wearable Medical Devices
The Penn State team behind these temporary tats hopes they can help spot heart attacks or power robotic prosthetics.
3 min read
If you’ve ever been hooked up to a wearable machine at a doctor’s office, then you’re familiar with the electrodes that are attached to your body to monitor its electrical signals. The problem with these prefabricated metal-based or hydrogel electrodes is that they don’t always stay in place during movement, for long periods or on sweaty or hairy skin.
Penn State University engineers aim to change this with paint-on tattoos that use conductive ink to power sensors for wearable devices such as EEGs, ECGs and EMGs that track brain, heart and muscle activity, respectively.
As reported in a paperpublished Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the engineering team filed a provisional patent for this ink, a water-based solution mixed with polymers and acidic...
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