Inked up: Smart tattoo monitors your health

Researchers from Harvard and MIT developed smart tattoo ink that can monitor different health metrics such as dehydration and blood sugar.

The Dermal Abyss tattoo changes colour to reflect changes in the wearer’s body. By monitoring the body’s interstitial fluid, the ink changes from green to brown when glucose levels increase. To reflect dehydration the team has also developed a green ink that grows more intense as sodium concentration rises.

The tattoo was developed by two postdoctoral fellows at Harvard Medical School and colleagues led by Katia Vega at MIT’s Media Lab. The team tattooed the inks onto pig skin and observed how the colour changed.

The tattoos were developed as a way to overcome some of the limitations of current monitoring devices. Ali Yetisen, a postdoctoral fellow Harvard Medical School said: “We were thinking: New technologies, what is the next generation after wearables? And so we came up with the idea that we could incorporate biosensors in the skin.”

The team said that current wearables don’t seamlessly integrate with the body and face other issues such as short battery life and the need for wireless connectivity.

“We wanted to go beyond what is available through wearables today,” Yetisen continued.

The team state that the Dermal Abyss tattoo needs the inks to be stabilised so they don’t fade or diffuse into surrounding tissue.

Applications for the tattoos include them being used to monitor chronic conditions and to even to be used with astronauts, as they require continuous health monitoring. The team has also developed an app that can analyse a picture of a sensor and provide quantitative diagnostic results.

Nan Jiang, postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s hospital, said: “The purpose of the work is to light the imagination of biotechnologists and stimulate public support for such efforts. These questions of how technology impacts our lives must be considered as carefully as the design of the molecular sensors patients may someday carry embedded in their skin.”