When battlefields honk of the war-torn cries, with soldiers lying wounded and finding no leeway to escape, only instant diagnosis and treatment is what they crave. Reaching the nearest field hospital takes time, and we know soldiers have no alternative to self medicate. Therefore, either the marines would lift him through, or he would succumb to his injuries. When most battlefield deaths occur within the first 30 minutes after injury, Joseph Wang and his team of nanoengineers thought it was time they did something to minimize maximize the soldiers survival rate. $1.6M has been funded for a project, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, wherein UC San Diego nanoengineers are working to create a “field hospital on a chip,” that is a sense-and-treat uniform for the soldiers.
What’s Innovative:
We know the limitations of self-medication, but the wearable field hospital on a chip could be an innovation that takes the concept to scaling heights. Monitoring a soldier’s sweat, tears or blood, sense-and-treat system will keep track on his war-field related injuries, comprising trauma, shock, brain injury or fatigue. On recognizing the actual cause, the related medication would be instantly triggered into the soldier through his uniform.
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Injury biomarkers can be detected through the body evolvement. These would serve as biological input signals for the enzymes logic system, which would carry out the preordained set of diagnostics, responding to the biological variance detected in the biomarkers. Wang and his team have all hopes to see this technology for first aid, readily made a possibility soon. For it though, they will have to get the enzyme logic system work proficiently in sensing electrodes which can be worn.
