Wound care
An Illustration of the PETAL sensor adhered onto a burn wound for colorimetric analysis of wound healing status.
Patients with chronic wounds experience severe pain, social isolation, and significant emotional and physical distress. They often face months of treatments and exhaustive interventions that don’t lead to healing, but instead end with limb amputation, or worse, death. As the incidence of chronic wounds continues to surge with the increasing elderly population and a sharp rise in obesity and diabetes, conventional strategies can’t keep up. Luckily, teams of researchers across the globe are looking for ways to use advances in technology to improve the care pathway for wounds.
Emerging technologies One such example is the PETAL patch – a product born of extensive research from the National University of Singapore (NUS). A team of scientists at NUS developed the experimental PETAL patch dressing to continuously monitor a wound’s state of healing, without needing a power source to do so. “The PETAL patch is a specially designed flexible patch made out of paper, within which we incorporated sensors to measure five biomarkers in wound fluids that can indicate whether a wound is healing properly or not,” says Benjamin Tee, associate professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the NUS College of Design and Engineering and the Institute for Health Innovation & Technology. Tee, who led the research, explains that currently, clinicians swab a wound and send it to the lab for culture to assess its healing status. But dressing removal and swabbing are often painful and require additional time and resources to provide the information needed to proceed with proper interventions that promote healing. The PETAL (Paper-like Battery-free In situ AI-enabled
Practical Patient Care /
www.practical-patient-care.com
Multiplexed) patch essentially does the swab and lab analysis by collecting the wound fluid into its five- petalled flower panel, and using a proprietary deep learning algorithm, it assesses the status of the wound through its biomarkers within fifteen minutes. The PETAL patch has multiple layers: The bottom layer is a medical tape that adheres to the skin, there’s a middle fluidic panel layer arranged in a five- petalled flower panel that collects wound fluid and a breathable top layer made of transparent silicone. Once applied to a wound, the patch collects fluid through an opening in the petal-shaped fluid panel and distributes it throughout the five channels. Once inside the channels, it can sense five different biomarkers, including pH, temperature, uric acid, moisture, and trimethylamine (TMA). These carefully selected markers help assess wound inflammation, infection, and the overall wound environment. “We chose these five biomarkers because they were the most relevant to wound healing for burn wounds,” says Tee. “We can change the number and type of biomarkers depending on the type of wound.” The patch doesn’t need a battery or external power source; it is simply a piece of paper that, Tee expects, will eventually be designed into bandages where the sensor material will change colour. The patient or clinician will be able to use a smartphone to capture the sensor images, and the AI algorithm will quickly and accurately determine the healing status of the wound. “We hope to increase biomarkers and improve our AI algorithm with even higher accuracy in tracing the wound-healing status, to enable earlier wound interventions so patients can recover without any scars,” says Tee. “The next steps are human studies, and we would love to extend the technology beyond
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www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adg6670
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