Staying Fit
It may sound far-fetched but electrical engineers at Korea University in Seoul have turned Tootsie Rolls into a modern medical diagnostic tool that someday could be used to monitor creatinine levels for patients with chronic kidney disease.
It turns out the candy, patented by Leo Hirschfeld and first sold in 1896 according to the company, can conduct electricity — and with a little manipulation can be transformed into a sensor that appears to reliably measure voltage levels in saliva that vary depending on how salty the liquid is.
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In a report appearing in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, researchers Beelee Chua and Donghyun Lee describe how they incorporated the chewy chocolate treat into a disposable sensor that detects salt and electrolyte levels in saliva. The prototype they designed could detect drops in levels of salts that occur when a woman ovulates and increases in levels of salts that signal a problem with the kidneys, they found.
The Korea University researchers acknowledge that additional testing is needed, but they see potential in replacing disposable test strips in some at-home diagnostic kits with a soft candy electrode that can be licked.
“Given the ubiquity of soft candy, the simplicity of the molding process, and the negligible medical waste stream, it is a more appropriate approach to diagnostics design for resource-scarce clinical settings, such as those in developing countries,” according to the report. “The broader impact of this work will be the paradigm shift of soft candy from food to a new class of edible, moldable, high-resistivity, and stable electronic materials.”
To make the candy sensor, the researchers flattened a Tootsie Roll and created a crosshatch pattern of crevices on the surface to hold saliva. The modified candy was then attached (using two thin reusable aluminum tubes) to an electric circuit with a voltage detector, explains a news release from the American Chemical Society.
This is not the first sweet Chua and Lee have researched to potentially lower the cost and environmental waste of medical devices. In 2019, they turned Haribo gummy bears into a force transducer to measure signs of child development based on chewing power.
Peter Urban is a contributing writer and editor who focuses on health news. Urban spent two decades working as a correspondent in Washington, D.C., for daily newspapers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, California and Arkansas, including a stint as Washington bureau chief for the Las Vegas Review Journal. His freelance work has appeared in Scientific American, Bloomberg Government, and CTNewsJunkie.com.
