Smart Patches Are Becoming More Than Wearables: The Race to Put Continuous Healthcare on the Skin

A patch on the skin can now do far more than cover a wound.

Researchers are developing smart patches that can measure electrical signals, track temperature and movement, analyze biological fluids, monitor biomarkers and communicate data wirelessly. Some experimental systems are even being designed to combine sensing with drug delivery or wound treatment.

The technology is moving quickly. But the more interesting story is not that patches are becoming smaller or smarter. It is that they are beginning to change how often, where and how healthcare data can be collected.

A 2026 review in BioMedical Engineering OnLine describes smart patches as multifunctional systems spanning continuous health monitoring, controlled drug delivery, tissue regeneration and nerve stimulation. The review covers patches designed for the skin, eye, ear, mouth and nose and highlights the growing role of flexible electronics, nanomaterials, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

That matters because much of healthcare still depends on snapshots.

A patient visits a clinic, gives a blood sample, records a blood-pressure reading or undergoes an examination. The measurement can be clinically valuable, but it represents one moment.

A smart patch is built around a different idea: keep measuring while life is happening.

The need for continuous monitoring is growing

The potential market for continuous monitoring is being driven by a very real healthcare problem.

According to the World Health Organization, the number of people living with diabetes increased from approximately 200 million in 1990 to 830 million in 2022. More than half of people living with diabetes were not taking medication for the condition in 2022. Diabetes and kidney disease caused by diabetes were responsible for more than 2 million deaths in 2021, while high blood glucose contributed to around 11% of cardiovascular deaths.

Hypertension presents another enormous monitoring challenge. WHO estimates that around 1.3 billion adults aged 30–79 years worldwide have hypertension, with nearly half unaware that they have the condition.

The attraction of wearable monitoring is therefore straightforward: if disease-related changes can be detected continuously rather than periodically, there may be more opportunities to identify deterioration earlier and intervene sooner.

But that promise depends entirely on whether the measurements can be trusted.

And that is where smart patches become much more interesting.

The patch is becoming a miniature sensing platform

The simplest smart patches measure physical signals.

Flexible sensors can detect temperature, pressure, strain, movement, pulse and electrical activity such as ECG, EEG or EMG. Other patches are being designed to analyze sweat or interstitial fluid for biochemical information.

The underlying technology is surprisingly diverse. The 2026 BioMedical Engineering OnLine review describes substrates including polyimide, polyethylene terephthalate, PDMS, polycarbonate, PTFE, silicon and even cellulose-based materials. Conductive components can incorporate graphene, carbon nanotubes, MXenes, conductive polymers and metallic nanomaterials. Manufacturing approaches include screen printing, inkjet printing, laser processing, 3D printing and photolithography.

The objective is not simply to make electronics flexible.

The patch has to conform to the body, maintain contact with the skin, tolerate movement, collect a usable signal and remain stable long enough to produce meaningful information.

That combination is considerably harder than building a sensor that works once in a laboratory.

The biggest shift: patches are starting to measure chemistry, not just movement

One of the most important developments is the move toward biochemical sensing.

Sweat is particularly attractive because it can be collected without conventional blood draws. Researchers have developed experimental patches capable of simultaneously analyzing multiple sweat components.

For example, a 2025 study in npj Flexible Electronics reported a microfluidic sweat patch designed to measure glucose, lactate, urea and pH. The system used approximately 4 microliters of sweat as its minimum reported sweat volume and incorporated four microfluidic channels to distribute sweat to different sensing areas.

That is impressive engineering.

But it does not mean the patch can already replace a blood test.

The relationship between a biomarker measured in sweat and the corresponding concentration in blood can be complicated. Hydration, exercise, temperature, sweat rate and individual physiology can all influence the measurement.

The same problem appears with interstitial fluid.

And this is precisely why one of the most important developments in the field is not another laboratory sensor. It is the appearance of human clinical evidence.

A patch that tracks a drug every five minutes

In 2026, researchers reported a pilot clinical trial of a wearable electrochemical aptamer-based patch designed to continuously measure vancomycin concentrations in dermal interstitial fluid.

The study involved just six healthy participants, making it an early-stage study rather than evidence for routine clinical use.

The patch was designed to generate measurements every five minutes over 24 hours. However, because of sensor degradation, the researchers focused their primary analysis on the first 12 hours.

Why is this important?

Vancomycin is a drug for which therapeutic drug monitoring is important. Conventional monitoring relies on intermittent measurements. A continuously sensing patch could, in principle, show how drug exposure changes over time rather than providing only occasional snapshots.

The researchers also used pharmacokinetic modelling to examine the relationship between interstitial-fluid and plasma concentrations.

The concept is bigger than vancomycin. If reliable continuous drug-concentration monitoring becomes possible, it could eventually support more individualized dosing for medicines where getting the dose right is particularly important.

But the word eventually matters.

Six participants are not enough to establish clinical effectiveness. The study also identified sensor degradation. Larger studies involving patients, different drugs and longer monitoring periods will be necessary before such systems can be considered established clinical tools.

That distinction between technical feasibility and clinical validation is one of the most important themes in smart-patch development.

Wearables are already entering drug development

The shift is visible beyond individual experiments.

A 2026 analysis published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery examined 1,021 interventional clinical trials registered between 2001 and 2025 that incorporated wearable-derived data.

The researchers identified five broad ways wearables were being used in drug development: studying drug effects, optimizing dosing, monitoring adherence, and optimizing drug-delivery media and delivery techniques.

Adhesive patches were the dominant wearable format in these trials, largely because of continuous glucose monitoring. At the same time, applications were expanding into sleep, cardiovascular function, movement and brain signals.

But there is an important warning in the same analysis.

Despite the growing number of clinical trials using wearable data, formal regulatory qualification of wearable-derived measures remains rare. The review identified SV95C in Duchenne muscular dystrophy as the only formally qualified wearable-derived measure at the time of publication.

So the number of trials is growing much faster than the number of wearable measurements that have become accepted regulatory endpoints.

That tells us exactly where the industry still has work to do.

From monitoring to treatment

The next step is even more ambitious.

Instead of a patch simply detecting a problem and sending an alert, researchers are exploring systems that can potentially respond to what they detect.

This is particularly interesting in wound care.

Experimental smart wound patches have been designed to combine sensing with therapeutic functions. One reported system integrated pH and glucose sensing, antimicrobial functionality, negative-pressure wound treatment and vancomycin delivery.

The concept is sometimes described as a move toward closed-loop or “sense-and-treat” healthcare.

The patch could theoretically detect changes in the wound environment and use that information to guide treatment.

But again, most of these systems remain experimental. They should not be confused with established clinical products.

The same distinction applies to emerging patches designed to detect molecular biomarkers. Researchers are exploring wearable electrochemical systems for biomarkers ranging from metabolic molecules to proteins associated with disease.

The technological capability is expanding rapidly.

The clinical evidence is not expanding at the same speed.

AI may be what makes all this data useful

A continuous patch could potentially generate thousands of measurements from a single person.

That creates another problem: what do we do with all the data?

AI and machine learning are increasingly being incorporated into wearable systems to identify patterns, detect abnormalities and convert raw sensor signals into potentially useful information.

The 2026 smart-patch review specifically identifies AI, IoT, cloud computing and edge computing as technologies supporting the development of intelligent wearable systems.

But AI does not automatically solve the problem.

A 2025 Nature Reviews Endocrinology review on wearable molecular sensors highlights several unresolved issues, including the need to understand longitudinal biomarker patterns, overcome technical limitations in continuous monitoring, validate models in large and diverse populations, and determine how these systems should fit into clinical workflows.

There is also a statistical problem.

When a device collects thousands of measurements, it becomes possible to discover correlations that may look meaningful but are not clinically causal or reproducible.

So the future is unlikely to be simply:

more sensors → more data → better healthcare.

The real equation is closer to:

better sensors + validated biomarkers + reliable algorithms + clinical evidence = useful healthcare data.

Regulation is becoming part of the technology story

The FDA is already tracking the growth of sensor-based digital health devices.

Its current list includes authorized medical devices incorporating sensor-based digital health technology, including wearable formats such as patches, bands, rings and smartwatches. The agency specifies that these devices can be continuous or spot-monitoring systems and can be used outside traditional clinical settings.

The list includes recent authorizations such as the Dexcom G7, the Onera SleepMap, the HemoSphere Nano Monitor and other sensor-based systems.

This is important because “wearable” and “medical device” are not interchangeable terms.

A consumer wearable collecting wellness information does not face the same regulatory expectations as a device making claims about diagnosis, treatment or clinical decision-making.

As smart patches become capable of measuring more medically significant biomarkers, that distinction becomes increasingly important.

The IP landscape could become just as complicated

There is another layer to this technology race: intellectual property.

The invention may not be the patch itself.

It could be the biochemical recognition mechanism, the electrode design, the microneedle architecture, the microfluidic channel, the material that maintains stable skin contact, the method for compensating for temperature or pH, the wireless communication architecture, or the algorithm that interprets multiple signals.

In a future closed-loop system, the therapeutic mechanism could become another layer of IP.

That means companies developing smart patches may need to think about their patent strategy across the entire technology stack rather than protecting only the physical device.

Freedom-to-operate questions could become equally important because a single product may combine technologies originating from several technical fields: flexible electronics, biosensing, microfluidics, wireless communication, AI and drug delivery.

The real opportunity is continuous biological intelligence

Smart patches are no longer just an idea for making healthcare more convenient.

There are now FDA-authorized wearable medical devices, more than a thousand clinical trials incorporating wearable-derived data, human studies investigating continuous drug monitoring and a rapidly expanding research pipeline for biochemical sensing.

But the most important question is no longer whether we can put sensors on the skin.

We clearly can.

The harder question is whether those sensors can produce accurate, reproducible and clinically meaningful information for long enough to change what a healthcare professional does.

That is the gap the industry now has to close.

If it succeeds, the smart patch could evolve from a wearable sensor into something much more significant: a continuous biological interface connecting the human body to diagnostics, drug development, clinical decision-making and potentially treatment.

The future of smart patches may therefore not be about creating a better wearable.

It may be about making continuous healthcare data trustworthy enough to act on.

Sources:

Author

Surbhi Ashri

Smart Patches Are Becoming More Than Wearables: The Race to Put Continuous Healthcare on the Skin