Electroactive Materials based Bandage for Accelerated Wound Healing

Currently, more than 10 million people in Europe suffer from chronic wounds such as venous and pressure ulcers and an estimated 2–4% of European health care budgets is allocated for their care. According to National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, the estimated cost of wound care in 2012-2013 was about £5b. This figures will increase with demographic changes pointing to the rise in the population of elderly people (aged over 65). In the UK alone, the elderly population is predicted to increase from 9.5m (2005) to 13m (2025). Therefore, there is a need to develop advanced and efficient wound care products to ensure the health care system remain sustainable while attempting to improve better quality of life for the people.
Wound healing can be accelerated by using electrical stimulation. But, the current electrical stimulation technology is complex, non-portable, requires external power, and can only be used in hospitals. These issues along with the high-cost prohibit the use of existing method by the lay person and discourages self-health management. ELECTROHEAL aims to overcome these challenge and develop a simple, cost effective and disposable electroactive wound dressing or bandage to accelerate the wound healing process.

Two main objectives of ELECTROHEAL programme are to:
Obj1: Establish the suitability of piezoelectric amino acid crystals for wound healing.
Obj2: Develop a non-invasive method for wound healing based on a smart bandage covered by biocompatible glycine piezoelectric materials.

Glycine as a biocompatible piezoelectric material could be an appropriate substance for wound healing. Different methods of fabrication of glycine film were investigated and a new method for stabilization of glycine piezoelectric crystals was developed. A flexible piezoelectric patches were fabricated by a composite of amino acid glycine and polymers which has stable crystallography phase and piezoelectric response. The simple solvent casting method is used to prepare a biodegradable β-glycine/chitosan based piezoelectric film. Piezoelectric voltage output of developed piezoelectric patch under different pressure were investigated. The fabricated piezoelectric film could produce 190 mV output voltage under 60 kPa pressure with the sensitivity of 2.82 ± 0.2 mV kPa−1 which is comparable to those of non-degradable commercial piezoelectric materials. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first biocompatible/biodegradable piezoelectric film made of an amino acid which have been reported so far. The fabricated device has the potential to be used for electrical stimulation of wound and monitoring pressure under the compression bandage. Two papers were published based on these achievements: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.9b21052 and DOI: 10.1109/ICSENS.2018.8589588

We expect that output voltage in the level of hundred mV/mm produced in the piezoelectric patch with direct contact with the wound area would be enough for electrical stimulation of wound.
Successful demonstration of this project developments on accelerated wound healing will have direct societal impact by providing easy to use solutions for wound healing and thus improving the quality of life for people. Developed wound healing dressing can have a huge impact also on the rural area, ODA countries, astronauts in space (as the healing processes are delayed significantly in the space) and military personnel wounded in the field.

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ELECTRO-HEAL (Electroactive Materials based Bandage for Accelerated Wound Healing)

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