Grove School in medical breakthrough with wearable disposable electrotherapy

NEW YORK, Nov. 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ --Imagine going to the pharmacy and getting an adhesive bandage that applies gentle energy to accelerate wound healing, reduce infection or enhance skin complexion. Or sticking a patch on your forehead to control a migraine, depression or other brain disorders. Or getting your next vaccine booster not through a needle, but from a sticker. These may soon be a reality, thanks to cutting-edge research at The City College of New York led by the Grove School of Engineering's Marom Bikson, Mohamad Fallahrad, and Dean Alexander Couzis.

Entitled "Wearable Disposable Electrotherapy," the CCNY team's work appears in the journal Nature Communications. "It's a novel platform for medicine. Single-use millimeter-thick adhesive patches, delivering a specific therapy. Applications include skin healing, applying energy to treat brain disorders, and delivering drugs through the skin," said Bikson, who leads the Neural Engineering Group in the Grove School.

The disposable single-use devices, which is as discreet as adhesive bandages, is activated simply by placement on the body. The device senses the body and, over a few minutes or an hour, delivers a single therapy dose. The device can then be removed and thrown away. Bikson commented "We call is wearable medicine."

What makes Wearable Disposable Electrotherapy a technological breakthrough is that each patch is a thin electronic device able to deliver a therapeutic dose, but there are no packaged batteries or electrical components. "Since each patch is single use and disposable, we needed environmentally benign materials - so, no electronics," said Couzis. "Wearable Disposable Electrotherapy is the first electronics-free device that can sense and change the body. It took multiple innovations in chemical, electrical, and biomedical engineering to achieve this."

The prescribed therapy dose is regulated by dozens of printed chemical components. Together they form a thin 3D electrochemical. "Without using any electrical components, we created a device that self-powers and regulates therapy out of its electrochemical network," added Couzis. "For each application, such as wound healing, electrical therapy, or a drug-delivery patch, a unique electrochemical structure is created." But using only scalable additive printing technology and abundant materials, the cost of each device is reduced to pennies."

The use of the device determines its shape and function. For wound healing and skin enhancement applications, Wearable Disposable Electrotherapy are made like adhesive bandages, but with the added benefit of bioelectric healing. For uses such as migraine, depression, or dementia a patch across the forehead delivers therapeutic electricity to the brain. For drug delivery, such a pain medication or even vaccines, the drug is also built into the device which delivers it through the skin when the patch is applied.

"We have produced prototypes for each application and proven they deliver the prescribed therapy. We are not planning clinical trials. For each use case we are working with leading medical centers to test therapy efficacy," said Bikson.

Contact: Jay Mwamba, [email protected], 917.892.0374.

Correction: A photo caption has been added.

SOURCE City College of New York, Office of Institutional Advancement and Communications