Smart dressings for wound monitoring and treatment: new-type skin bioelectronic systems applicated in wound repair

Wound management, especially for chronic wounds, has emerged as a major healthcare challenge, which brings great pain and other negative impacts to patients, and accounts for significant portions of health care budgets. The common practice of covering wounds with dressings, owing to the lack of information about wound healing underneath, cannot provide insights into the status of the wound. Changing the dressings to inspect wounds not only disturbs normal healing process of wounds, but also causes pain to affected individuals. Therefore, it is necessary to rely on parameters in the wound microenvironment such as temperature, pH, moisture level, and etc., by continuously monitoring, to indicate the wound status and healing stages. Moreover, intelligent on-demand treatment systems also can be integrated into the smart dressing, called new-type skin bioelectronic systems to be applicated in wound repair. Besides monitoring, these kinds of skin bioelectronic systems can offer effective treatments automatedly when the wound deteriorates. It makes timely treatment possible and avoids delayed treatment and uncovering the dressing to give medicine. In this review, wound healing-related indexes in the wound microenvironment are discussed, applications of various smart dressings with functions of monitoring or/and treatment are summarized.