Recent Advancements in Smart Bandages for Wound Healing

Wound healing is a complex and dynamic process, making the accurate and timely assessment of skin wounds a crucial aspect of effective wound care management, especially for chronic wounds. Unlike conventional wound dressings that simply cover the wound area once some form of medicine is administered onto the wound, recent studies have introduced versatile approaches to smart wound dressings capable of interacting with wound fluids to monitor physicochemical and pathological parameters to determine the wound healing status. Such electrochemical wound dressings can be integrated with on-demand, closed-loop drug delivery or stimulation systems and ultimately expanded into an ideal technological platform for the prevention, treatment, and management of skin wounds or illnesses. This article briefly reviews the wound healing mechanism and recent strategies for effective wound care management. Spe-cifically, this review discusses the following aspects of smart wound dressings: sensor-integrated smart bandages to detect wound bio-markers, smart bandages developed to accelerate wound healing, and wireless, closed-loop automatic (on-demand) wound healing systems. This review concludes by providing future perspectives on effective wound care management.