John Rogers, a University of Illinois researcher, has been working on a series of super-thin, flexible electronics that are both wearable and totally unnoticeable to their wearer — they’re so thin, they’ve often been referred to as electronic tattoos. His research team’s latest device contains a hypersensitive thermometer that he says can do the job of a quarter-million dollar thermal infrared camera, even though it costs only pennies worth of parts. Not only can the wearable thermometer do the same job, Rogers says that it can do it better: because it attaches to the skin, it can measure temperature over a long period of time, during a person’s day-to-day activities, and without its target shifting around and introducing inaccuracies to a camera’s steady sensor.
For certain people who can’t properly control their body temperatures, knowing their skin temperature as far down as to the millikelvin (about two one-thousandths of a degree Fahrenheit), as this device allows, can let physicians tell exactly what’s going on underneath it. The device can watch how heat flows through the bloodstream, or see how the dilation and constriction of blood vessels subtly alters the temperature around them.
Applying this wearable thermometer to the skin may be just the beginning, however. Roger’s team is experimenting with how the device could be applied to internal organs, even being placed right against the interior wall of the heart to measure its own properties. Right now that’s just temperature, but additional sensors could be added on to report back an even richer body of detail.
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