Researchers have recently developed a new, low-cost wound dressing that could dramatically speed up healing.
The new bandage, developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, generates energy based on human body motion to apply gentle electrical pulses at the site of an injury.
In tests, the bandages reduced healing times to a mere three days compared to nearly two weeks for the normal healing process, reported the German news agency.
The Science Daily website cited Xudong Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at UW-Madison, as saying: "We were surprised to see such a fast recovery rate. We suspected that the devices would produce some effect, but the magnitude was much more than we expected.”
For several decades, researches have shown that electricity can be beneficial for skin healing, but most electrotherapy units in use today require bulky electrical equipment and complicated wiring to deliver powerful jolts of electricity.
Wang explained that the new device is as convenient as a bandage you put on your skin.
The new dressings consist of small electrodes for the injury site that are linked to a band looped around a wearer's torso. The electricity is generated based on the natural expansion and contraction of the wearer's rib-cage during breathing. The resulting energy is used to deliver low-intensity electric pulses to the wound site.
"The nature of these electrical pulses is similar to the way the body generates an internal electric field," said Wang, adding that those low-power pulses won't harm healthy tissue like traditional, high-power electrotherapy devices might.
