Battlefield Technology

Relying on nanosensors that could fit in the tear duct of the eye or elsewhere, just beneath the skin, UC-San Diego professor Joseph Wang and Clarkson University professor Evgeny Katz are developing devices that can diagnose a battlefield injury based on biomarkers in body fluids, and automatically release appropriate drugs.  By monitoring glucose, oxygen, lactase and norepinephrine in, say, sweat or tears, Wang and Katz suppose they can determine the nature of an injury (shock or brain trauma, e.g.) by the different concentrations of those biomarkers.  Those values would feed into logic gate software which would determine the appropriate medication to be released into injured person’s bloodstream.  While a complete solution remains a distant goal, research on the nanosensors alone is compelling.            MORE

Image Credit:   Joseph Wang and Technology Review