Have you ever had your blood pressure checked? It involves a nurse wrapping a cuff around your arm and pumping it until it’s tight.
Now, scientists have created a high-tech tattoo that can do the same thing, and it’s even more accurate!
What’s Blood Pressure, Anyway?
Blood pressure is a sign of how healthy our hearts are. High blood pressure can lead to heart problems if not treated. But most people only have their blood pressure checked when they visit a doctor.
These checks only give a quick snapshot of our blood pressure at one moment. It’s like taking one picture of a movie – it doesn’t show the whole story.
So, What’s New?
Professor Deji Akinwande and Professor Roozbeh Jafari have been working on a cool project. They’re from the University of Texas and Texas A&M University.
They’ve created a high-tech electronic tattoo that you can wear on your wrist. It can measure your blood pressure all the time, not just at the doctor’s office.
It gives us a much better picture of how our bodies are working.
How Does It Work?
This electronic tattoo, or e-tattoo, is made of a super thin and strong material called graphene. It’s a bit like the graphite you find in pencils, but arranged in thin layers.
This e-tattoo is put on a stretchy material that sticks to your skin. Once you put it on, you don’t even notice it. It doesn’t move around, which is important to get accurate readings.
The e-tattoo works by sending a tiny electric current into the skin. It then measures the body’s response, which is known as bioimpedance.
This response is linked to changes in blood pressure. But it’s not a simple link, so the scientists had to use a clever machine-learning model to understand it.
Why Is This Important?
This e-tattoo is a big leap forward. It lets us keep an eye on blood pressure all the time.
You could be sleeping, exercising, or even just feeling a bit stressed, and it’ll be working. It can take thousands more measurements than any other device.
Also, unlike smartwatches that slide around and struggle to measure darker skin or larger wrists, the e-tattoo works well on everyone.
The goal of this kind of tech is to give us more freedom. It lets us go about our day while it collects important health data.
Professor Akinwande explains that all this data could help create a digital model of our bodies. This would allow doctors to predict how we might respond to different treatments over time.
This work is a big step towards that goal. The Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health all helped fund this project.
It’s still early days, but who knows – maybe one day, we’ll all be wearing high-tech tattoos to keep us healthy!
If you care about high blood pressure, please read studies that early time-restricted eating could help improve blood pressure, and coconut sugar could help reduce blood pressure and artery stiffness.
For more information about blood pressure, please see recent studies about added sugar in your diet linked to higher blood pressure, and results showing plant-based foods could benefit people with high blood pressure.
The study was published in Nature Nanotechnology.
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