Recent wearable devices offer portable monitoring of biopotentials, heart rate, or physical activity, allowing for active management of human health and wellness. Such systems can be inserted in the oral cavity for measuring food intake in regard to controlling eating behavior, directly related to diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and obesity. However, existing devices using plastic circuit boards and rigid sensors are not ideal for oral insertion. A user-comfortable system for the oral cavity requires an ultrathin, low-profile, and soft electronic platform along with miniaturized sensors. Here, we introduce a stretchable hybrid electronic system that has an exceptionally small form factor, enabling a long-range wireless monitoring of sodium intake. Computational study of flexible mechanics and soft materials provides fundamental aspects of key design factors for a tissue-friendly configuration, incorporating a stretchable circuit and sensor. Analytical calculation and experimental study enables reliable wireless circuitry that accommodates dynamic mechanical stress. Systematic in vitro modeling characterizes the functionality of a sodium sensor in the electronics. In vivo demonstration with human subjects captures the device feasibility for real-time quantification of sodium intake, which can be used to manage hypertension.
Although skeletal muscle is highly regenerative following injury or
disease, endogenous self-regeneration is severely impaired in conditions of
volume traumatic muscle loss. Consequently, tissue engineering approach is a
promising approach to regenerate skeletal muscle. Biological scaffolds serve as
not only structural support for the promotion of cellular ingrowth, but they
also impart potent modulatory signaling cues that may be beneficial for tissue
regeneration. In this work, the progress of tissue engineering approaches for
skeletal muscle engineering and regeneration is overviewed, with a focus on the
techniques to create biomimetic engineered tissue using extracellular cues.
These factors include mechanical and electrical stimulation, geometric
patterning, and delivery of growth factors or other bioactive molecules. We
further describe the progress of evaluating the therapeutic efficacy of these
approaches in preclinical models of muscle injury.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.