Digital Tattoos to monitor your Blood

A Conventional Tattoo

Do you think tattoos are only for Harley riders or teenagers? If so change your opinion, for bioengineering doctoral student Kate Balaconis has proved it false with the invention of digital tattoos that monitors the blood and communicates through iPhone.
These tattoos would contain nanosensors, instead of Chinese characters,which can study the host's blood levels of glucose, sodium and even alcohol using an iPhone 4 camera. Sooner or later diabetes would get linked with this and patients would get rid of painful finger pricks for blood tests - assuming that the patient has the iPhone designed by bioengineering grad student Matt Dubach. The tattoo works as mentioned below :-

Readings of blood concentrations show up like this, with different colors indicating different sodium concentrations. Photo Courtesy of Matt Dubach.

Like the tattoo ink a hundred-nanometer-wide set of sensors goes under the skin which are encased in a oily agent to ensure the whole contraption stays together. As they are implanted certain nanoparticles will bind exclusively to specific blood contents, as sodium or glucose. these particles are made neutral in charge by additives. Presence of target triggers an ion release, manifested as florescent change. As mentioned earlier Matt Dubach customized the iPhone 4 whose camera can read the color shifts and translate the result into quantifiable data. The lens is surrounded by plastic ring which blocks out ambient light while a battery powered blue LED contrasts with the sensors. The iPhone camera has built in RGB software which is used to filter the light reflected from sensors to process them. The blue LED used for it best uses the iPhone's built in RGB setup to process the data accurately ,but lights that project other color were hindered by Apple's built- in optical filter. This9-volt blue light and attached to the phone, works with the sensor's red shifted fluorescence as red shines well through skin. Dubach says using the iPhone is not far off ,for the data collected with the iPhone still requires a secondary machine to process it and that the app for it is likely on the way.

So won't it be fun to see nanoparticles performing the work of an entire clinical analyzer just by interacting with smartphones. This would be a major achievement in the field of personalized medicine. Diabetic and athletes will have the greatest benefit by this for they can measure thier own statistics withot depending on big, pricey, and exclusive medical equipment.

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