The trends in wound management: Sensing, therapeutic treatment, and 'theranostics'

Over recent years, chronic wounds caused by various factors, including diabetics and burns, have represented the major challenge and financial burden for both physicians and patients. Traditional wound care strategies based on passive dressing are not capable of real-time monitoring and timely treatment, which may result in overaggressive or conservative therapeutic options. To address these drawbacks, smart bandages with the capabilities of monitoring biomarkers for diagnosing and even implementing approaches to achieve efficient healing of chronic wounds have attracted widespread research interest. The current research frontier is in the embryonic phase toward a “closed-loop” wound management style. In this review, not only technologies for wound environment monitoring but also various mechanisms, materials and characteristics of platforms that promote wound healing are discussed, while the research progress on the concept of “theranostics” is summarized. This review provides a fundamental understanding of the wound biology, and should be valuable for the desirable assessment of wound status, and timely medical intervention, which is expected to facilitate the evolution of a new generation of smart bandages for preferable wound care applications.