Experts create intelligent plaster to monitor patients

Medical engineers said Sunday they had created a device the size of a plaster which can monitor patients by tracking their muscle activity before administering their medication.

Methods for monitoring so-called "movement disorders" such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease have traditionally included video recordings or wearable devices, but these tend to be bulky and inflexible.

The new gadget, which is worn on the skin, looks like a Band-Aid but uses nanotechnology—in which building blocks as small as atoms and molecules are harnessed to bypass problems of bulkiness and stiffness— to monitor the patient.

Scientists have long hoped to create an unobtrusive device able to capture and store medical information as well as administer drugs in response to the data. This has proved difficult due to the large amount of onboard electronics and storage space required, high power consumption, and the lack of a mechanism for delivering medicine via the skin.

But the team from South Korea and the United States said they had found the solution in nanomaterials, creating a flexible and stretchable device that resembles an adhesive plaster, about one millimetre (0.04 inches) thick.

Still a prototype, the gadget comprises multiple layers of ultrathin nanomembranes and nanoparticles, the creators wrote in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.