Smart Bandage Research Uses mHealth to Improve Wound Healing, Care

Researchers from three US universities have launched a federally funded project to create a bandage with mHealth sensors that could help serious wounds heal faster and more effectively.

With as much as $16 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) researchers at the University of California campuses at Davis and Santa Cruz and Tufts University are looking to create an mHealth wearable that uses digital health sensors, AI tools, regenerative medicine and a telemedicine platform.

The goal is to not only create a sensor-embedded smart bandage that stimulates healing, but include a remote patient monitoring platform so that care providers can track the wound’s progress and adjust the bandage as needed.

"What's unique about this project is we want to close the loop between sensing and stimulating, so that there is feedback between the wound and the intelligent bandage," Marco Rolandi, an associate professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Cruz’s Baskin School of Engineering and the project’s principal investigator, said in a press release.

According to officials, the research team wants to create a flexible bioelectronic bandage that controls the electrochemical environment of the wound, while sensors monitor the physiological processes in the wound. A telemedicine platform using AI technology would use data from the sensors to adjust the healing stimuli and report the progress on a dashboard.

"Wound healing problems affect many people, from veterans and firefighters to people with chronic diabetic ulcers, so it's important to develop a new strategy to improve the treatment of hard-to-heal wounds," Rolandi said.