Professor Shamim's Smart Bandage hits Nature Scientific Report and win the IEEE MECAP' 16 Best Paper Award

-By Valentina De Vincenti

Professor Shamim's new cutting edge, flexible and low-cost technology to monitor chronic wounds recently put CEMSE on the map of health care system research. 

His scientific paper - Low-Cost Inkjet Printed Smart Bandage for Wireless Monitoring of Chronic Wounds -appeared on Nature Scientific Reports and won IEEE MECAP'16 - Middle East Conference on Antennas and Propagation - Best Paper Award, in Beirut, last September.

"More and more, we live in a smart world. Wearable sensors are being developed to monitor various physiological parameters of the human body, including temperature, heart rate, electrocardiogram and blood pressure. Chronic wound monitoring is one area of human health that surprisingly has received relatively little attention from the research community," Shamim said on Nature Scientific Report (doi:10.1038/srep28949).

Atif Shamim, Professor of Electrical Engineering at CEMSE Division and Director of IMPACT Laboratory, along with Ph.D. Student Mohammed Farooqui, crafted Smart Bandage, a medical device capable of wirelessly communicating parameters and abnormalities in the wounds' recovery process.

Secure and smart: two types of small inkjet-printed sensors are applied on a disposable bandage. In this way, bleeding, pressure, as well as pH levels of the wound, are traced and immediately communicated via the inkjet-printed-loop antenna to the remote medical staff's smartphone. 

Following several expressions of interest by pharmaceutical companies, including Johnson&Johnson, Professor Shamim plans for developing marketable products on a massive scale, making the Smart Bandage technology one of the vanguards of wearable sensors for healthcare applications.