Electronic Tattoo Offers Highly Accurate, Continuous Blood Pressure Monitoring - SciTechDaily

By University of Texas at Austin.

A new electronic tattoo that can be worn comfortably on the wrist for hours delivers continuous blood pressure measurements at an accuracy level exceeding nearly all available options on the market today.

Credit: University of Texas at Austin.

But now, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University have developed an electronic tattoo that can be worn comfortably on the wrist for hours and deliver continuous blood pressure measurements at an accuracy level exceeding nearly all available options on the market today.

“Blood pressure is the most important vital sign you can measure, but the methods to do it outside of the clinic passively, without a cuff, are very limited,” said Deji Akinwande, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin and one of the co-leaders of the project, which is documented in a new paper published on June 20, 2022, in Nature Nanotechnology.

“Taking infrequent blood pressure measurements has many limitations, and it does not provide insight into exactly how our body is functioning,” said Roozbeh Jafari, a professor of biomedical engineering, computer science, and electrical engineering at Texas A&M and the other co-leader of the project.

Credit: University of Texas at Austin.

The continuous monitoring of the e-tattoo allows for blood pressure measurements in all kinds of situations: at times of high stress, while sleeping, exercising, etc.

However, leading smartwatches are not yet ready for blood pressure monitoring.

E-tattoos make sense as a vehicle for mobile blood pressure monitoring because they reside in a sticky, stretchy material encasing the sensors that is comfortable to wear for long periods and does not slide around.

In medicine, cuff-less blood pressure monitoring is the “holy grail,” Jafari said, but there isn’t a viable solution on the market yet.

Reference: “Continuous cuffless monitoring of arterial blood pressure via graphene bioimpedance tattoos” by Dmitry Kireev, Kaan Sel, Bassem Ibrahim, Neelotpala Kumar, Ali Akbari, Roozbeh Jafari and Deji Akinwande, 20 June 2022, Nature Nanotechnology.

Team members on the project include Dmitry Kireev and Neelotpala Kumar of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin; Kaan Sel and Bassem Ibrahim of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M; and Ali Akbari of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M.