A Technological Make-Over for the Band-Aid

Produced by the BBC, WGBH, and Public Radio International (PRI) Broadcast worldwide on PRI's The World, June 9, 1999 Transcribed from PRI Web site recording by BioKey

Lisa Mullins: This is The World; I'm Lisa Mullins. You'd think that some things we grew up with just couldn't be improved: Popsicles, baseball, and Band-Aids. Well, two out of three isn't bad. It turns out that old-fashioned bandage is about to get a technological make-over. Are you ready for the smart bandage? The World's technology correspondent, Rebecca Roberts, is in San Francisco. Rebecca, what the heck was wrong with the good old fashioned Band-Aid anyway?

Rebecca Roberts: It was dumb. This is a smart bandage. And what's so smart about it is it has built-in sensors, that you can program to sense whatever it is you need to know about the wound under the bandage.

L: O.K. Is there something like a little circuit board buried in the bandage?

R: Basically, it's a little microchip, and it can sense, say, a bacteria build-up which would signal an infection, or it can sense swelling or heat; and then there's also little microchips that process that information and store it, and say, well, yesterday over a 24-hour period, this wound reached this temperature for this many hours.

L: Hm. And what's the reason for the transmittal of this information?

R: Actually, the first thing they're going to use it for is what they are calling the Smart Patch, which is an eye patch to treat amblyopia, which is better known as lazy eye. Apparently the big problem with lazy eye is the only way to treat it is by patching the dominant eye. But kids don't want to patch their dominant eye, and they're constantly taking their patch off. If you have sensors in the patch, then the doctor can tell whether or not the child's actually wearing it.

L: I see. So this is a bit like a portable parent.

R: A bit. You know, I spent a lot of my childhood lying to my orthodontist about whether or not I'd been wearing my retainer. (laughter) I think this is a common problem. There's no way to measure whether or not the treatment is effective if you can't trust the patient to actually wear the device.

L: Now that's very interesting. I wonder—Let me pick up on that point. If this is a sensor to detect whether people are wearing their devices or using their bandages properly, does it track other things, for instance a person's whereabouts?

R: Well, it doesn't constantly transmit back to the hospital. It doesn't have a radio device on it. You do have to walk into the hospital, bring your patch to the doctor, and he can check the microchip. The microchip stores the information, and then you bring the stored information back to the doctor.

L: So how did the scientist develop this idea in the first place? Where did the idea come from?

R: The idea came from an ophthalmologist at the Rotterdam Eye Hospital in the Netherlands, a doctor named Jan-Tjeerd de Faber. He called his old friend, a guy named Edward Sternberg, in Milwaukee, who is a bio-engineer, and said, Isn't there some way to put some kind of electronic device in a patch. Once they realized you could put sensors in a bandage, then you could program those sensors to do pretty much anything.

L: Hm.

R: So, there's a lot of remote applications. Say, a soldier on the battlefield, that doesn't have regular medical help. It's not practical for the soldier to be walking into a hospital and getting checkups regularly.

L: It sounds so amazing. On the one hand, who'd have thought that we'd be walking around at some point with computerized or electronic Band-Aids on our thumbs or patches over our eyes. On the other hand, it seems like it's such a simple idea, and it's surprising that nobody actually thought of it before.

R: It is sort of surprising; and when you go through the patent lists, there are things like diapers that will set off an alarm when they're wet, (laughter) though there are other signs, like cacophony, that would arise from that.

L: (laughter) I know. I think there are some low-tech ways to check whether or not a diaper's wet. I'm not sure that's an essential product.

R: There are other health devices that have sensors in them, but there are no other smart bandages.

L: Do we know at this point who would be paying for it? Would insurance cover it?

R: It's not on the market yet, so that hasn't been hashed out. A lot of the literature from the company that's been formed to market this, BioKey (TM), based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is targeted toward health care providers. If you can track how effective this device is, then that tells you, the insurance company, that your dollars are going to work. So they seem to be very aware of making sure insurance providers see the value of this. Because there's no one else doing this kind of work, if they can beat everyone else to the market, they stand to make a lot of money.

L: Rebecca Roberts is The World's technology correspondent, speaking to us from San Francisco. Thank you again, Rebecca.

R: Thanks, Lisa.