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Stretchable hydrogel can be used as a 'smart bandage' and delivery vehicle for medical devices.
Engineers at MIT have developed an elastic yet sturdy hydrogel material that can be used as flexible, biocompatible wound dressing and as a smart delivery method for drugs or medical devices.The material was designed to be embedded with medicallyuseful electronics, such as conductive wires, semiconductor chips, LED lights, and temperature sensors, according to a study published online December 7, 2015 in the journal Advanced Materials.
Electronics coated in the hydrogel could be placed not only on the surface of the skin but also inside the body—such as implanted biocompatible glucose sensors or soft, compliant neural probes, the researchers wrote.
“Electronics are usually hard and dry, but the human body is soft and wet. These two systems have drastically different properties,” said lead investigator Xuanhe Zhao, Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Dr. Zhao explained, “If you want to put electronics in close contact with the human body for applications such as health care monitoring and drug delivery, it is highly desirable to make the electronic devices soft and stretchable to fit the environment of the human body. That’s the motivation for stretchable hydrogel electronics.”
Current hydrogels are often brittle and made of degradable biomaterials that don’t last long, he explained. So, his team designed a hydrogel that is not only as flexible as human soft tissues, but can bond strongly to non-porous surfaces such as gold, titanium, aluminum, silicon, glass, and ceramic.
Adaptado de: <http://www.mdlinx.com/medicalstudent/article/395#> Acessado em 15 de setembro de 2016.
The hydrogel material which engineers have come up
with at MIT