Tattoo Ink Shows Glucose Levels At Any Given Moment

While Apple is working on a glucose tracker, MIT and Harvard Medical School are looking for ways to test glucose levels without accessing a device. The most recent discovery in that sense is a tattoo that changes as your blood sugar level modifies #biomagic

Researchers are calling it DermalAbyss. The idea that fueled this project is that our body can be an interactive display. It can show what’s going on beneath the skin, without having to resort to painful and complicated procedures. This works by replacing tattoo ink with “biosensors whose colors change in response to variations in the interstitial fluid.”

To test their theory, scientists used three different inks, one to measure glucose levels, another to check pH levels and the third one to show whether the quantity of sodium in the blood was life-threatening. From all three, the one that could really make a difference is the one measuring glucose:

“Currently, during daily activities and alimentary habits, diabetics need to monitor their glucose levels by piercing the skin, 3 to 10 times per day. With Dermal Abyss, we imagine the future where the painful procedure is replaced with a tattoo […] Thus, the user could monitor the color changes and the need of insulin.”, the team wrote. 

Indeed, the wearer could simply look at his skin to see if he’s in any danger; in this case, the tattoo would turn from blue to brown. pH levels would be elevated if the colors used would change from pink to purple, while sodium levels would send an alert if they’d shine bright green under UV light.

So far, the team has tested this ink on patches of pig skin, using injections to simulate the change of fluid levels. As it is only in proof-of-concept stage, there’s no telling when DermalAbyss could become reality. At this moment, the team isn’t looking to commercialize it: “This is a research project, and there are currently no plans to develop Dermal Abyss as a product or to pursue clinical trials.”