Smart wound dressings for wound healing

Wound management is a big challenge worldwide, laying a huge financial burden on the government of every nation. Wound dressings that can facilitate wound healing have been under investigation for a long time. Conventional wound dressings, such as bandages, hydrogels and foams, help the wound healing not as efficiently as they were expected since they can’t respond to the wound healing process well. Smart wound dressings that can interact with the wounds, sense and react to the wound condition or environment changing by employing built-in sensors and/or smart materials such as stimuli-responsive materials and self-healing materials, have been proposed to effectively facilitate wound healing. During the past decade, smart wound dressings have sprouted, and various smart wound dressings including biomechanical wound dressing, stimuli-responsive wound dressing, self-healing wound dressing for motional wounds, self-removable wound dressing and monitoring wound dressing have emerged. However, a review on these smart wound dressings is lacking. Thus, in this review, a summary of smart wound dressings will be given, as well as the status, advances, challenges and future trends of this area, aiming to give researchers a clear understanding of the past, present and future of this emerging area.