To some people, wounds are but a small cut that will last not even a couple of days before it goes away. On the other hand, some people have wounds that are unpleasant to see, let alone feel. And most of these wounds take months to heal and are expensive to treat.
In the UK, the country's key agency for funding researches focused on engineering and physics, known as the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, or EPSRC, has agreed to fund a research of two years that will cover the development of smart sensor technology to better understand wound formation and treatment.
Doctors, Michael Crichton and Jenna Cash will be working on the project with the goal of understanding wounds and then reversing the cost of their treatment. Crichton is a biomedical engineer at Heriot-Watt University, while Cash is a specialist in wound healing immunology at the University of Edinburgh. With their respective specializing backgrounds, they plan to create a microsensor that would be able to detect mechanical changes that happen to the tissue during wound healing, on a microscale. "We want to understand what actually happens in a wound," Crichton explained. "Lots of research has looked at the biological properties of wounds, but we know very little about the mechanics of how wounds heal, especially at the microscale, which is where changes are happening at sub-hair width scales."
For the purpose of the research, the microsensors would be made at the cleanroom of Heriot-Watt University. Looking at a long term application for the invention would be to incorporate them in bandages so that health professionals could assess the condition of the wound without physical contact.
The microsensor would be embedded in bandages so that they can understand wound healing during the actual process, thus obtaining their goal without interfering with the natural process. As the sensor does its job of telling the researchers how the wound heals, it would also be able to tell the doctors if the wound needs a dressing change or a different kind of treatment. This would be an additional layer of result validation to the judgment of health professionals. "At the moment, we judge the progress of wounds on patients' reports of pain, and how the wound looks to the naked eye of health professionals," said Crichton. "Our smart sensor will alert the patient and their care team when intervention is needed to make sure the wound heals better, or when it is all progressing nicely under the bandage."
The researchers hope to use the same technology in the future for monitoring of other tissues and organs like damaged livers and kidneys.
