Amazing,tattoo that can sense your health status

A new project from MIT Media Lab is the latest experiment to combine tattoos and biotech, creating biosensing ink that could one day give us information about our health by merely looking at our skin.

The project, called DermalAbyss (which, by the way, would be a great name for a metal band), is a collaboration between MIT students Katia Vega, Xin Liu, Viirj Kan, and Nick Barry as well as Harvard Medical School students Ali Yetisen and Nan Jian. Their idea is to turn the skin, via tattoos, into a kind of interactive display. The inks they created can sense health indicators like the pH, glucose, and sodium ion levels in interstitial fluid, and change color according to the current level. "The pH sensor changes between purple and pink, the glucose sensor shifts between blue and brown; the sodium and a second pH sensor fluoresce at a higher intensity under UV light," the researchers say in the video.

This isn't the first experiment to meld tattoos, fashion, and technology. The materials scientist John Rogers created tattoo-like electric circuits that can be stuck onto the skin and monitor temperature, hydration, and strain. MIT Media Lab has also experimented with skin-based interactive displays in the past, when they created connected metallic flash tattoos that can control gadgets like smartphones.

So far, these biosensing inks have only been tested on pig skin, but there's no reason these tattoos shouldn't become reality. Technology like this would be hugely beneficial to people with diabetes, who could check their blood sugar by merely looking at their arm rather than using expensive and painful blood tests. It won't be long before body-mod fanatics are using inks likes these on themselves.

Source: MIT Media Lab via Dezeen