‘Smart teeth’ invention makes cover of New York Times magazine

The New York Times Mag­a­zine this week fea­tures a wire­less “tooth tat­too” devel­oped at Prince­ton that detects harm­ful bacteria.

The sliver-thin device — made of silk, graphene, and a tiny antenna — is applied to the tooth much like a child’s stick-on tat­too. It can detect bac­te­ria asso­ci­ated with not just cav­i­ties but, per­haps more impor­tant, dis­eases else­where in the body. The researchers have already used it to iden­tify bac­te­ria asso­ci­ated with stom­ach ulcers and some cancers.

The Times included the tat­too in a piece fea­tur­ing “32 Inno­va­tions That Will Change Your Tomor­row.” See the full piece here (the tooth tat­too is inven­tion is #23).

The Times isn’t the only media out­let enrap­tured with the poten­tial of the tooth tattoo.

Read more cov­er­age in IEEE Spec­trum, the Daily Mail, Giz­mowatch, the Tren­ton Times, and the New York Daily News.

The research was reported March 27 in the jour­nal Nature Com­mu­ni­ca­tions.The paper’s Prince­ton authors included Michael McAlpine, assis­tant pro­fes­sor of mechan­i­cal and aero­space engi­neer­ing, Naveen Verma, assis­tant pro­fes­sor of elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing, grad­u­ate stu­dent Manu Man­noor, under­grad­u­ate Jef­fer­son Clay­ton, and asso­ciate research scholar Amartya Sen­gupta at Prince­ton. Co-authors included Hu Tao, David Kaplan and Fiorenzo Omenetto of Tufts Uni­ver­sity and Rajesh Naik of the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Sup­port for the research was pro­vided by the Amer­i­can Asthma Foun­da­tion and the Air Force Office of Sci­en­tific Research. A full account of the research can be found here.