Dyson Award for smart dressing that knows if wound has healed

Record ID: 1698061

  • Title: Dyson Award for smart dressing that knows if wound has healed
  • Date: 16th November 2022
  • Summary: WARSAW, POLAND (NOVEMBER 16, 2022) (Reuters) (SOUNDBITE) (English) PIOTR WALTER, SmartHEAL DEVELOPER, SAYING: “Conventional electronics is printed on a stiff board, on PCBs (printed circuit board). Our solution and our way of manufacturing allows us to print them with our own composites on the textiles and it's integrated fully within the dressing. So we have to our own
  • Embargoed: 30th November 2022 17:48
  • Keywords: Dyson Award James Dyson Award SmartHEAL chronic wound
  • Location: WARSAW, POLAND / UNKNOWN LOCATIONS
  • City: WARSAW, POLAND / UNKNOWN LOCATIONS
  • Country: Poland
  • Topics: Europe,Health/Medicine
  • Reuters ID: LVA006993216112022RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: A smart sensor for dressings which indicates how well a wound is healing by measuring its pH level, invented by three students from Poland, has won this year's prestigious James Dyson Award International prize.
    SmartHEAL is a dressing that monitors the condition of chronic wounds and can detect infection without being removed and disrupting the tissue.
    "Every time you take off the band aid dressing, you're introducing new pathogens, you risk infections, you disrupt the tissue, slowing the healing process and most importantly, it's very uncomfortable for the patients. It's painful. So with SmartHeal you can see beneath the dressing without taking it off," Tomasz Raczynski, one of three PhD students at Warsaw University of Technology who invented SmartHEAL, told Reuters.
    SmartHEAL provides doctors and patients with a key piece of data - the pH level of a wound - that can tell them how a wound is healing.
    The team says they heard about the link between the pH of a wound and the healing process and realised they could solve a problem the National Center for Biotechnology Information says affects around 2% of people in developed countries.
    “Our invention is based on a pH sensor that is integrated within the plaster and this pH sensor allows us to check the state of the chronic wound and informs the user whether he's supposed to change the dressing or keep the dressing on the wound,” Dominik Baraniecki told Reuters.
    Each dressing has an electronic pH monitor printed on the fabric and an RFID antenna which will communicate with a cellphone or tablet placed near it. The team say they have managed to develop a system that can be mass produced with current textile industry processes at a cost of just a few cents each.
    "The best part of all of it is that even with our prototypes, we are using the same manufacturing technology that is used in the textile industry, in the mass producing," Piotr Walter, an electrochemist, told Reuters.
    Unlike wounds that heal at a normal rate, chronic wounds need to be kept covered which makes it hard to know if it needs attention without disturbing it to examine it.
    The most common mistake in wound healing is changing the dressing too often, which can lead to severe illness or death, the team say.
    The team says they plan to use the $35,000 prize money to start clinical trials and hope to finish the certification process in time to start to selling SmartHEAL dressings in 2025.
    (Production: Stuart McDill)
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