Tattoo For Diabetics Changes Colors Along With Blood Sugar Levels

Up until now, for me, tattoos have been just an aesthetic addition to a human’s body. But, from now on, they also serve another purpose! Namely, if you haven’t heard about it, scientists from MIT located in Boston have done something fantastic with some of their tattoos. They’ve managed to develop an ink that can change its colors in order to alert people suffering from Diabetes of changes in their blood sugar levels.

As you probably already know, Diabetes is a common illness that is plaguing millions of people across the whole world. More than 10 percent of Americans are suffering from this disease.

In short, this disease is stopping the body from producing insulin, and insulin is the primary energy source for our body. So, if diabetics don’t manage their insulin levels, there are some complications that can arise from this.

The same thing as for many diseases still stands with Diabetes. If you treat it earlier, you can manage almost all of the symptoms.

If you want to recognize Diabetes in its early stages, it is good to check your blood sugar levels. And, the most common way that people do this is with a finger prick. As time goes by, diabetics stop checking their blood sugar levels, and at one point, they cease entirely. Reasons vary from time to money constraints.

But, scientists at MIT have decided to step in. They developed a color-changing ink that can notice blood sugar changes in our bodies and respond to them.

Instead of tattoo ink, scientists have used four biosensors, which change their colors in response to the fluids in the diabetics’ bodies.

One of the sensors is a pH sensor and this changes between purple color and pink color, another one is the glucose sensor which changes between blue color and brown color, the last two sensors are the second pH level sensor and the Sodium sensor which change under a UV light under high intensity.

This is a great way to save time and money, and it works even better for the diabetics who don’t get coverage for their glucose devices. The only bad thing about this tattoo is the fact that it is still in the test period for now. Pig’s skin is used in order to determine the efficacy of the ink, and they still haven’t gotten to the human testing part just yet.

We hope that this project gets into human testing first and then into the production phase, very soon. It is a great innovation, and we know that diabetics will go crazy for it! Until then, check out the cool videos that this team made with the color-changing ink. Enjoy!