How everyday tools can monitor your health

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Fifty years ago glucose meters were big machines in laboratories, today they’re a plaster on the arm, he says. The same development is underway for many types of medical measuring devices. And it goes fast. When I entered this field ten years ago, it had barely taken shape, and today you are already in some clinical applications.

How do you think it will turn out in the long run?

– I would say that our first main goal is rapid, individually tailored diagnostics. That you do not have to go to the doctor to take samples in case of infection, because the sensor in the house has already detected what you are infected with. It is possible to perform a large percentage of the usual tests in health care.

– The most advanced goal is for wearable technology to collect a long series of measurements that we can use to learn to predict disease in the future, Onur Parlak continues. Patterns we don’t know about today, but can emerge when you have massive amounts of data to draw from. It is a more complex function, but due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence, it does not seem unrealistic.

It raises questions about data security

Onur Parlak stresses that it is important that new technology is used responsibly.

– He says data security is the really big problem. We’re talking very privacy-sensitive surveillance on a massive scale. Society needs to set clear rules about the storage, ownership and sharing of this data.

Another dilemma is that there will be a lot of data being generated that regular people don’t fully understand and may be concerned about.

– Think of parents who explain something alarming in their children’s health data, says Onur Parlak. Personally, I don’t know if it is really necessary for us to access all our individual data from the near body technology.

His research relates to wearable electronics for a number of medical purposes, including stress measurement and epileptic seizure detection. One of the projects is about wounds that don’t want to heal.

Wounds that are difficult to heal are unfortunately a common problem in healthcare. We are trying to develop a smart patch that measures a number of factors in the wound such as the level of inflammation, temperature, pH and bacterial growth. In this way, what is happening in the wound can be monitored in a way that does not interfere with healing and does not require too many care resources. The idea is for wearers to have an app in their mobile phone that tells them, for example, when it’s time to change a patch or if an infection has occurred that needs to be treated. In the long run, one can imagine the patch itself delivering medication directly into the wound when needed.

Onur Parlak explains that the development of near body technology is part of a larger trend toward the many sensors around us in our daily lives. Some fit better on the body, others fit somewhere else. Instruments that monitor our sleep are conveniently placed next to the bed and sensors for urinalysis are reasonably placed in the toilet seat.