Wearable electronics for skin wound monitoring and healing

Abstract

Wound healing is one of the most complex processes in the human body, supported by many cellular events that are tightly coordinated to repair the wound efficiently. Chronic wounds have potentially life-threatening consequences. Traditional wound dressings come in direct contact with wounds to help them heal and avoid further complications. However, traditional wound dressings have some limitations. These dressings do not provide real-time information on wound conditions, leading clinicians to miss the best time for adjusting treatment. Moreover, the current diagnosis of wounds is relatively subjective. Wearable electronics have become a unique platform to potentially monitor wound conditions in a continuous manner accurately and even to serve as accelerated healing vehicles. In this review, we briefly discuss the wound status with some objective parameters/biomarkers influencing wound healing, followed by the presentation of various novel wearable devices used for monitoring wounds and accelerating wound healing. We further summarize the associated device working principles. This review concludes by highlighting some major challenges in wearable devices toward wound healing that need to be addressed by the research community.

Development of a Flexible and Wearable Microelectrode Array Patch Using a Screen-Printed Masking Technique for Accelerated Wound Healing

“…25 In a similar context, the development of smart patches for wound healing integrated with several wound-monitoring sensors has been explored by several researchers world-wide. 17,22,26 Mostafalu et al in 2018 developed a smart bandage for wound treatment with integrated temperature and pH sensors for wound monitoring onto flexible bandages along with a hydrogel patch containing thermo-responsive drug carriers integrated with a microheater. 3 The developed patch, however, did not involve the use of micro-electrodes for the healing purpose.…”

Recent progress in flexible piezoelectric devices toward human-machine interactions

“…Nevertheless, conventional electronic devices are often rigid and unwieldy, restricting their wearability and conformability with human skin, which severely affects the sensing accuracy and user experiences. On this basis, many researchers globally have investigated flexible electronic devices with more eminent stretchability and flexibility for applications such as health monitoring [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and gesture interactions [15][16][17] . These flexible devices can be fixed to any shape of object [18,19] , such as skin [20][21][22][23] , gloves [24,25] and rackets [26] , to continually monitor human behavior in real time.…”

Direct fabrication of high-performance multi-response e-skin based on a graphene nanosheet film

“…In recent years, wearable electronic device technology has been used in a wide range of applications in motion detection [1][2][3][4][5] , medical monitoring [6][7][8][9] and virtual reality (VR) [10][11][12] . In particular, electronic skin (e-skin) has gradually attracted attention [13][14][15][16][17][18] , since it has outstanding flexibility [6,[19][20][21] , enabling it to fit the complex surface of the human body and various detection capabilities [22,23] , such as piezoelectric [24,25] , piezoresistive [26][27][28][29] and photoelectric sensors. Although e-skin has promising development prospects, it is still plagued by problems, such as the instability caused by the peeling-transferring preparation process [30,31] .…”