Smart sensor makes sense of wounds

Wounds can be unpleasant for those that have them and costly to treat, with the NHS spending £4.5-5.1bn each year to manage them.

Now, with EPSRC-funding, Dr Michael Crichton, a biomedical engineer at Heriot-Watt University and Dr Jenna Cash, a specialist in wound healing immunology from the University of Edinburgh, are working on a two-year project to better understand wounds and reverse the cost of treating them.

They will do this by developing a microsensor that will detect wound healing by monitoring the microscale mechanical changes that happen to the body’s tissue.

“We want to understand what actually happens in a wound,” said Dr Crichton. “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.

“We’re working to create a small sensor that can be embedded in a bandage to measure changes in a wound’s properties without interfering with the process.