This latest entry into mobile health is an electronic piece that wirelessly sends data to a phone or PC.
A new form of wearable technology is now on its way into the mobile health industry, in the form of an electronic skin patch that will track a number of different medical indicators that will then be wirelessly transmitted to either a computer or a smartphone.
This represents the very latest in mobile health tech and medical tracking devices.
This new mhealth wearable technology was created by a team of researchers from Northwestern University and from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, under Yonggang Huang and John A. Rogers. Their new tech was described in the Science journal’s April edition. The device is made out of nano-materials, which has allowed it to be as tiny as it is while still performing.
The wearable technology comes in the form of a flexible, soft rectangle that sticks directly to the skin.
Instead of being smarwatches or glasses, these are tiny stickers that include a microchip. That chip’s structure makes it possible for it to detect even the most subtle movements of the body so that it can identify abnormal movements such as tremors. The inventors have said that these wearables could change the way that we think of EEG and EKG monitoring inside of a clinical environment.
These little adhesive tabs were designed to be worn all the time in order to be able to keep track of the wearer’s help. There are many different potential applications for this tiny device. These include everything from monitoring specific symptoms that have to do with an illness suffered by the wearers, to tracking the activity of the muscles.
Fortunately, the flexible design and small size of these tabs means that the wearer will be comfortable to the point that he or she can forget that this wearable technology is even on the body. At the same time, the data that it is collecting can be sent wirelessly to another device such as a computer or a smartphone. This device has overcome the challenge that has been a barrier until now: bulky and hard chips that needed to be worked into a flexible and soft design.
