Todd Coleman often felt like people were prisoners to technology. In his TED Talk A temporary tattoo that brings hospital care to the home, he discusses the work that he’s done to make medical monitoring less intrusive and more mobile. Coleman defines the ideal state for this system - to have “the benefits of high-fidelity monitoring that we get with our trusted partners in the hospital while someone is at home living their daily life”.
Coleman set his UCSD students at the Arthur C Clarke Center for Human Imagination to work, teaming with material scientists to find the best possible monitoring solution. This effort turned into a flexible patch modeled after computer chips, printed onto a flexible material instead of a wafer. Patches can measure mobility, temperature, and biorhythms. The patches can also be built to power themselves, and transmit their information to a central computer in the home or remotely to the medical facility.
After a first round of testing Coleman found that their method was inefficient with a low yield and prone to errors. Nurses also told the group that there was a large pool of medical adhesives already in use that could be incorporated into the project and avoid further testing and approvals. This led the group to incorporate the sensors into the adhesives themselves.
Todd Coleman is a great speaker, and talks not just about his discovery and the project itself but the usability and patient concerns. He has a large concern about privacy, and how taking data from a flexible strip and loading it into the cloud could be a target for hackers and identity theft. This talk frames the technology in terms of fetal monitoring but there seems to be a full range of medical applications.