Pressure ulcers, or bedsores, affect about 2.5 million Americans every year at an annual cost of $11 billion. Now, engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have teamed up with colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco to develop a smart bandage that can detect early tissue damage. Electrical engineer Michel Maharbiz says each bandage is fabricated with tiny electrodes on a thin, flexible film.

"What all these little electrodes do is they’re running lots of little bits of current through, between themselves. And so when you take all that information you can build a map of the state of the bed sore underneath where the bandage is."

Maharbiz says this flexible electronic technology can be easily carried around by a nurse to spot-check target areas on a patient – or even used for wound dressing.

"So you can imagine a future, which is very close, where the bandage that you put on or the dressing that a surgeon or a physician might put on would actually be able to report a lot of interesting information about the progress of that wound."