A team of nanoengineers has developed a temporary tattoo that measures glucose.
Diabetics engage in a painful ritual every day, often several times: pricking their fingers with a spring-loaded needle to test the glucose in their blood. But that ritual could soon be put to rest, and replaced by a small patch designed to extract and measure blood-sugar levels. Flexible, easy to apply, and inconspicuous, the next-generation wearable is a promising step toward noninvasive monitoring of diabetes, a disease that affects 29.1 million people in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control [PDF].