Flexible Medical Sensors Made From Chewing Gum

Thursday, December 3, 2015 - 17:44 in Physics & Chemistry

Chewing gum Wayne Noffsinger/Flickr CC by 2.0 Chewing gum on your shoe? Annoying. Chewing gum as a medical device? Pretty cool. As detailed in a paper published last month in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces researchers have discovered they can make a sensor out of chewing gum and carbon nanotubes. To create the sensor, the team had a researcher chew Doublemint gum for 30 minutes (science is so hard sometimes). That chewed gum was then soaked in ethanol to clean it, and imbued with carbon nanotubes, tiny flexible pieces of carbon that can conduct electricity. The new sensors will eventually be able to monitor small body movements, like the rise and fall of your chest as you breathe, or the tiny movement of blood through your body as your heart pumps. Just like sensors...

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