Excuse me, but my Band-Aid is beeping

By Kirk Thurbide

When you enter a hospital, you think medicine, not engineering—but you should think twice. As medical technologies progress, collaboration with engineers is increasingly crucial to medical advances. Sensors, micro-electronics and wireless technologies are emerging from bioengineering applications that are integrating health care and engineering.

“The whole world is going wireless and it’s an exciting area,” says Dr. Jim Haslett, MSc’68, PhD’70, whose 35-year research career has made him a pioneer in wireless technologies. “When I was seeking out applications for wireless technology, biomedical engineering was a good, natural fit.”

Haslett and associate Dr. Ivars Finvers are heading up research and development of a “smart Band-Aid”—a temperature measuring system that will send real-time information to nursing stations.

“It ultimately should save money, increase patient safety and mobility, be more efficient and lessen staff work loads,” says Haslett. “The key to these wireless technologies is patient comfort and the ability for continuous monitoring.”

Eliminating wires from the continuous monitoring process gives patients more freedom from the medical machinery at their bedsides. The smart Band-Aid is undergoing ethics approval and Haslett hopes that trial testing of the new device will begin this year. He also hopes to expand its ability to read heart rates and blood oxygen levels.

Recently, Haslett's team joined forces with researchers at McGill University and Carleton University to further improve the technology. “Our aim is to make the smart Band-Aid cheap, disposable and more power efficient.”

The Advanced MicroNanosystems Integration Facility (AMIF), a new clean room facility at the U of C, was constructed to support, among other things, the fabrication, integration and packaging of these novel devices developed in conjunction with the Engineered Care initiative, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from science, engineering and medicine to introduce new technologies for improved health care.

Technologies being developed under the Engineered Care initiative are expected to dramatically alter the way we experience and think about a visit to the hospital.