“Smart sensor measures how itchy you are by how much you scratch” - New Scientist
Feeling itchy? A wearable sensor can measure how bad it is by tracking how often you scratch yourself. Itching is associated with many diseases and in some cases can be debilitating, but diagnosing chronic itching is difficult because there is no objective way to measure how it feels.
Now, Steve Xu at Northwestern University in Illinois and his colleagues have created a soft, waterproof sensor to do just that. It sticks to the back of a person’s dominant hand, measuring the motion of their scratching as well as picking up sound waves generated by nails on skin.
“If you were to sort of scratch in the air, that’s not real scratching, but the motion is identical,” says Xu. “Our sensor is able to distinguish between the two and that’s something that systems that have been tried before simply cannot do.”