Cell Watch

A smartwatch wraps around your wrist to measure your heart rate and count your steps. Now there’s a device that could do the same for your individual cells. The flexible material (red) can snugly wrap around neurons (brain and nervous system cells, blue), monitoring and even altering the electrical and metabolic activity within. They gently snap into place, like the ‘slap bracelets’ 90s kids may remember, when activated by light, which can be shone through the body allowing entirely non-invasive positioning. This flexibility allows the wearables to conform to the many different shapes neurons take, and once in place they could help prevent neuron degradation and even compensate for the lost insulation that comes with conditions such as multiple sclerosis. The technology could eventually be used to integrate with other materials in tiny circuits that could measure and modulate individual cells, taking activity tracking to a new level.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Marta J. I. Airaghi Leccardi and colleagues
• MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Communications Chemistry, October 2024