Tattoo to Monitor Your Health? Harvard & MIT Researchers Are On It

CAMBRIDGE, MA — Harvard and MIT researchers have developed "smart tattoo" technology that could one day be used to monitor the health of its users.

Earlier this summer the researchers created smart ink, according to a number of reports. And this ink is capable of monitoring health by changing color (hypercolor T-shirts, anyone?) to tell an athlete whether they are dehydrated or a diabetic if his blood sugar rises.

The project, called “Dermal Abyss,” was conducted as a proof of concept, according to MIT. Researchers said it would need further refinements before moving to the market, including stabilizing ink so designs don’t fade or diffuse into surrounding tissue. (Subscribe to Cambridge Patch for more local news and real-time alerts.)

The work is being conducted by two postdoctoral fellows at Harvard Medical School and colleagues led by Katia Vega at MIT’s Media Lab.

"The Dermal Abyss tattoo inks change color according to the chemistry of the body’s interstitial fluid, which can be used as a surrogate for constituents of the blood," according to the Harvard Gazette.

The colors they've worked out so far change from green to brown as glucose in them increases. The team also developed a green ink that when looked at under blue light grows more intense as sodium concentration rises.

They didn't get a guinea pig to test the tattoos, but they did get some pig skin. They tattooed the inks onto segments of pig skin and noted how they changed color or intensity in response to different biomarkers.

Read the Gazette story here.

Check out the MIT Lab report here.

Vice seems to have first reported this in June.

Video still courtesy of Harvard Medical School