Track soldiers with tattoos

A special thin film can help scientists track the status of soldiers in rehearsal and combat situations.

Tattoo on the body of an American Marines. (Photo: Wired)

A number of scientists from the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) have proposed the idea of creating a special type of tattoo for heart rate monitoring, body temperature and response. Study of soldiers in different training situations. They hope that new materials technologies will help them put sensors, signal chips and more onto thin films of the same size as their fingers to stick to human skin like tattoos. These are called epidermal ectodermal (EES) systems. The sensors on EES will measure heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure and many other indicators, Wired reported.

DARPA hopes researchers will create harmless EES on the skin, but can survive long enough in field exercises. They will be tough and elastic as well as hair, which can be attached to the skin by molecular binding forces. According to researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the user can stretch, flip, and slip a thin film, but they will not tear or damage.

"This breakthrough design will contain all of the equipment needed to track the physical state of people on a thin film of just the thickness of a human hair , " says Zhenqiang Ma, an electronics engineer. of the University of Wisconsin in the United States.