This Wearable Device Monitors Health by Sensing the Gases Passing Through Your Skin

Credit: John A. Rogers / Northwestern University.Your skin is breathing. This wearable gas sensor can measure it.Northwestern University researchers have developed the first wearable device for measuring gases emitted from and absorbed by the skin.By analyzing these gases, the device offers an entirely new way to assess skin health, including monitoring wounds, detecting skin infections, tracking hydration levels, quantifying exposure to harmful environmental chemicals and more.The new technology comprises a collection of sensors that precisely measure changes in temperature, water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which each give valuable insight into various skin conditions and overall health. These gases flow into a small chamber within the device that hovers above the skin without actually touching it. This no-contact design is particularly useful for gathering information about fragile skin without disturbing delicate tissues.“This device is a natural evolution of our lab’s wearable electronic devices that collect and analyze sweat,” said Northwestern’s John A. Rogers, who co-led the study. “In that case, we were analyzing sweat to learn about the wearer’s overall health. While useful, that method requires pharmacological stimulation of sweat glands or exposure to a hot, humid environment. We...

Read More........→July 04, 2025

Scientists Define a Color Never Before Seen by Human Eyes, Called 'Olo'–a Blue-Green of Intense Saturation

Photo by Hamish on UnsplashAn experiment in human photoreceptors allowed scientists to recently define a new color, imperceptible by the human eye, that lies along the blue-green spectrum but is different from the two.The team, who experimented on themselves and others, hope their findings could one day help improve tools for studying color blindness or lead to new technologies for creating colors in digital imagery.“Theoretically, novel colors are possible through bypassing the constraints set by the cone spectral sensitivities…” the authors write in their abstract. “In practice, we confirm a partial expansion of colorspace toward that theoretical ideal.”The team from University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington used pioneering laser technology which they called “Oz” to “directly control the human eye’s photoreceptor activity via cell-by-cell light delivery.”Color is generated in our vision through the transmission of light in cells called photoreceptors. Eye tissue contain a series of cones for this task, and the cones are labeled as L, S, or M cones.In normal color vision, the authors explain, any light that stimulates an M cone cell must also stimulate its neighboring L and/or S cones because the M cone spectral response function lies between that of the L and S cones.“However, Oz stimulation can by definition...

Read More........→July 01, 2025