Multifunctional hydrogel as wound dressing for intelligent wound monitoring

Abstract

• The hydrogel exhibits antibacterial, hemostatic and adhesive properties. • The hydrogel dressing monitors the wound pH in real-time through colorimetry. • The whole intelligent wound monitoring process mainly include three parts. • A combination of multifunctional hydrogel dressing and machine learning technology. Chronic wound remains a significant challenge in clinical care due to the long treatment process and the poor quality of tissue regeneration affected by bacterial infection, calling timely and effective wound management approach to achieve real-time intelligent wound monitoring and promote wound healing. In this work, a multifunctional hydrogel is employed as wound dressing for intelligent wound monitoring, which not only have the functions of antibacterial, hemostatic and adhesive properties for effectively promoting wound healing, but also can realize real-time wound status monitoring (e.g., pH). The whole intelligent wound monitoring process mainly includes three parts: wound recognition, real-time status monitoring and personalized wound management. Among them, the customized hydrogel wound dressing can accurately match the contour of the wound for precise treatment. Moreover, the personalized wound management model with high accuracy (94.47%) based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) machine learning algorithm can analyze and evaluate the wound healing and infection status through the colorimetric signal of the hydrogel dressing. This multifunctional hydrogel wound dressing, which integrates precise treatment, real-time monitoring and personalized management for intelligent wound monitoring, provides an advanced solution to accelerate wound healing and reduce bacterial infections and plays an inestimable step for future intelligent wound management.