Idea 1: Medical Tattoos
Medical wearables technology is an exciting space as of 2024. A Toronto-based startup called Synex Medical is harnessing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to measure blood glucose levels from skin contact via a ring wearable; researchers at UNC Chapel Hill have developed a wireless drug-releasing patch; researchers at MIT have devised an ultrasound patch.
Generally, I agree that health monitoring technology applied outside the body is a very high priority. One idea that I have in this vein is a contact lens or pair of glasses that could monitor retinal or other aspects of eye health, or perhaps even things like headaches. How? I have no idea. But it’s a target one could aim for in a product that many people already opt to use.
If we let go the constraint of outside-body application, what could be the next-best level of noninvasiveness we can achieve while opening up broader areas of application? One idea that comes to my mind is medical tattoos. Lots of people are already perfectly happy getting tattoos for non-medical reasons. What if they could also serve a medical purpose by, say, leveraging ink technology (possibly yet to be invented) that changes visual properties in the presence of different subdermal chemical markers? For example, what if a tattoo could change color or saturation in response to blood glucose above a certain level?