RESEARCHERS have created an electronic bandage that helps wounds heal FOUR TIMES faster. E-band was wrapped around the chests of rats with a cut on their backs.When they breathed, a positively and negatively charged layer rubbed together.
Skin has a remarkable ability to heal itself. But in some cases, wounds heal very slowly or not at all, putting a person at risk for chronic pain, infection and scarring. The bandage that generates a gentle electrical current could help wounds heal four times faster, research suggests.
Every time the rodents took a breath, an electrical pulse was generated, which was found to speed up their healing process. This caused skin-healing cells, known as fibroblasts, to flock to the injured area, which encouraged the production of collagen and new skin cells. The study was carried out by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and led by recent graduate Yin Long.
Diabetic foot, leg ulcers and surgical wounds are among the skin injuries that often don’t heal.They affect more than 6.5million people every year in the US, the authors wrote in the journal ACS Nano.
To power their electric bandage, or e-bandage, the researchers made a wearable nanogenerator by overlapping sheets of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), copper foil and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). The nanogenerator converted skin movements, which occur during normal activity or even breathing, into small electrical pulses. This current flowed to two working electrodes that were placed on either side of the skin wound to produce a weak electric field.
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