Billionaire Founder of software giant Microsoft, Bill Gates has predicts that a soon to emerge electronic tattoo technology will replace smartphones in the near future.
Currently, electronic tattoos are being developed by the biotechnology-based company Chaotic Moon. Electronic tattoos are intended to analyze and collect information from the human body.
The data stored by tattoos is medical and sports information so that it is possible to prevent and control disease, as well as improve physical and exercise performance through vital signs.
While electronic tattoos are still in development, they are known to be applied temporarily to the skin with tiny sensors and trackers that send and receive information via special inks that conduct electricity.
Gates wants electronic tattoos to replace smartphones. But the early adoption of electronic tattoos was not enough for the 66-year-old, who wanted this futuristic device to be a smartphone replacement.
Gates’ idea, which has been seen in several Hollywood films, is that people can use electronic tattoos developed by Chaotic Moon to make calls, send messages, or find addresses.
Until now there is still no talk regarding the estimated time when it will be launched or sold to the market. Gates and his team are looking at ways to make new devices people use and do things like smartphones.
Digital Tattoos Make Healthcare More
InvisibleWhat if markings on your skin could unlock your phone or get you access to entrance doors? And what if they could also measure your blood pressure or hydration level constantly in the background only alerting you in case of values out of the normal range? Digital tattoos could act as minilabs rendering our skin an interactive display and making healthcare more invisible at the same time. Here’s our summary of the latest trends and research efforts to make it happen.
Our bodies are the next frontier for technology
In the course of the development of medical devices, a general trend has emerged: tools are getting more miniaturized, digitized and connected than ever. While in the past, the ultimate goal of medical instruments was to somehow measure health parameters or to somehow record measurements, currently, the question is how to measure more accurately, more easily and simply by using aptly designed means.
However, the triumphant march of health sensors and wearables does not stop at creating ever tinier, more and more streamlined smartwatches or clothing clips – such as the Lumo Run -, the next frontier for technological advancement definitely takes us the closest to the human body that we have ever been. Seamless, thin and unrecognizable sensors made of flexible materials appear first interwoven with our clothes, then on our skin as digital tattoos, in our bellies as digestibles or in our blood vessels as nanobots.
In sports medicine, there are already digitized garments for improving performance. For example, HexoSkin developed a shirt with sensors woven into it that measures heart rate, breathing, counts steps taken, pace, and calories burned. Moreover, researchers working in nanotechnology, are experimenting with exceptionally micro-sized – smaller than a millimeter – robots that literally swim through your bodily fluids; and the FDA approved the first digital pill with a digital ingestion tracking system in 2017. Now, let’s see how digital tattoos want to crawl onto our skins
The most advanced digital tattoos to date
1) MC10
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company has been the most well-known enterprise specialized in the advancement of digital tattoos in the last ten years. John Rogers and his research team gave the groundwork for the revolutionary technology in stretchable electronics, on which MC10’s operation is based. The company tirelessly develops silicon devices thinned to a fraction of the width of a human hair, uses stretchable metallic interconnects, and elastic rubberlike polymers to form complete powered systems that sense, measure, analyze, and communicate information.
In 2016, MC10 marketed its BioStampRC sensor, a waterproof, band-aid-like patch that sticks to the skin and monitors movement, muscle performance or heart activity. The tiny wearable even has a Bluetooth radio and a miniature battery.
digital tattoos
Source: www.mc10inc.com
2) Graphene-based electronic tattoo
A group of researchers based at the University of Texas created graphene-based, almost transparent tattoos and published their work last year. While researchers usually use gold in electronic components, here, they applied graphene – a more conductive, hundreds of times thinner material allowing to naturally wrinkle with the skin.
Due to graphene’s unique electronic properties, these patches work like wearable electronic devices, enabling biometric uses, such as monitoring the electrical activity of the brain, heart, and muscles. The tattoos would even allow the wearer to directly interact with machines. These tattoos offer complete functionality for several days but can be removed simply with a piece of adhesive tape. It is hoped that as the cost of graphene falls, such tattoos will become affordable for medical use.
digital tattoos
Source: www.spectrum.ieee.org
3) Dermal Abyss
Researchers at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed color-changing digital tattoos within the project entitled Dermal Abyss, a bunch of biosensitive inks changing colors parallel how changes in your body occur. The inks can measure the concentration of glucose, sodium, and pH in the skin’s interstitial fluid, which surrounds cells.
The researchers have so far created a green ink that intensifies as the wearer’s sodium levels rise, which is often a sign of dehydration. Another green ink turns brown as glucose levels rise, which could be used by people with diabetes for monitoring their condition in the future. In early tests, pink inks turned blue as pH levels increased, but researchers are still testing various new inks for future use.
4) Glucose-monitoring temporary tattoos
Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego, have developed a temporary tattoo that both extracts and measures the level of glucose in the fluid in between skin cells. The flexible device consists of carefully patterned electrodes printed on temporary tattoo paper. The two electrodes apply a tiny amount of electrical current that forces glucose molecules that reside below the skin to rise to the surface, allowing for the measurement of blood sugar. In the spring of 2018, the research center started a clinical trial with 50 adults, aged 18 to 75, with either type 1 or 2 diabetes or diabetes due to other causes. They hope that one day the non-invasive, discrete and seamless digital tattoo can replace regular blood tests through finger pricks.
South Korean researchers have created something similar with the help of graphene. Seoul National University assistant professor Dae-Hyeong Kim and a team of researchers manufactured specific sensors that can detect your temperature and the pH/chemical composition of the sweat of people with e.g. type II diabetes. It then beams the data it collects to an accompanying smartphone app. If the system infers that the wearers need medicine based on the state of their sweat, the app computes for the amount of necessary medication. The patch’s microneedle array then injects the right amount into the body.
digital tattoos
