The development of the bandage is being undertaken at Swansea University’s Institute of Life Science. The Welsh scientists have developed a prototype with the help of a grant from the local city council (who have $1.6 billion to spend as part of the Swansea Bay City Region deal, which is designed to position Wales at the forefront of British science and innovation).
The dressings are fitted with tiny sensors which can pick up blood clotting, or spot infections, and wirelessly send data back to a clinician. The main limitation with the development of the bandage is not so much the technology that can detect wound healing but the slow progress around the U.K.’s 5G communications technology. For the bandage to work in hospitals, medical facilities need to have 5G enabled.
5G is ‘5th generation mobile networks‘ as ratified by the International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced standard. The numbers relating to each generation of mobile communications (such as the current 4G) are fairly meaningless; they simply represent a new stage in mobile generations that are non–backward-compatible cellular standards. What matters is how each generation differs to the one before. The ‘vision’ for 5G remains an area of debate; some technologists regard 5G as a process capable of supporting peak download speeds of up to 35.46 gigabits per second.
However the definition of 5G plays out, there are various areas of medical technology waiting to utilize the power that 5G promises. One such example is the smart bandage which uses uses nano-technology to sense the state of that wound at any one specific time. Trails show the wound sensing works well; what is needed is the ability to send the collected data rapidly to medical professionals.
Interviewed by the BBC, lead researcher Professor Marc Clement explains that the bandage “would connect that wound to a 5G infrastructure and that infrastructure through your telephone will also know things about you – where you are, how active you are at any one time.”
