Multifunctional smart wound dressing with hydrogel-embedded colorimetric-electrochemical fabric sensors as a prototype for point-of-care wound monitoring via a wireless miniaturized circuit and ArUco markers/app-based optical sensing

Wound care poses significant healthcare challenges because of prolonged healing, high treatment expense, and the necessity for continuous wound monitoring. Hydrogel-based wound dressings have emerged as versatile biomaterial platforms by providing a moist, biocompatible medium for wound healing while facilitating the integration of multifunctional diagnostic features. Here, a prototype multifunctional hydrogel-based smart wound dressing integrating an adhesive polymer with a fabric substrate was developed for integrated multi-parameter wound monitoring. The hydrogel-fabric platform incorporates colorimetric sensing zones for pH and H2O2 together with a fabric-printed electrochemical sensor for uric acid determination. To facilitate biomarker analysis, extend dressing functionality, and minimize user-dependent error, an Android application was developed to locate, identify, and quantify the colorimetric sensors using ArUco markers and regression analysis. The app incorporates thin-plate spline-based non-rigid transformation to compensate for label curvature on the body, along with color calibration to improve robustness against camera and lighting variations. Furthermore, uric acid voltammetric data acquired by a miniaturized electronic circuit are wirelessly transmitted to smartphones via Bluetooth, enabling portable point-of-care analysis. The fabricated dressing enabled pH monitoring over 4.0-9.0, H2O2 determination over 20.0-300.0 μmol L-1 with a detection limit of 10.0 μmol L-1, and uric acid determination over 10.0-1000.0 μmol L-1 with a detection limit of 5.0 μmol L-1. The intra- and inter-day RSD% values less than 8.9% and 11.6% were obtained for measuring pH, H2O2 and uric acid. By integrating the outstanding properties of a hydrogel-based biomaterial with dual colorimetric-electrochemical sensing, wireless data transmission, and smartphone-assisted analysis, a promising proof-of-concept approach has been provided by the proposed platform for multiparameter wound monitoring. Further studies involving biologically relevant wound matrices, comprehensive biological evaluation, and clinically validation are required to real wound monitoring and clinically wound care.