Special sensor-outfitted inks may be simply drawn onto skin like an elementary school tattoo, offering capabilities ranging from blood sugar monitoring to the detection of environmental toxins. Such inks are now a real, if experimental thing, courtesy of researchers at the University of California, San Diego, who've published their work on "do-it-yourself electrochemical biosensors" in the ?current issue of Advanced Healthcare Materials.

The idea is pretty much just what it sounds. Roll on some enzyme-laden sensor ink and it will react with the body's chemistry in this or that way. Using a Bluetooth-enabled ?potentiostat, it could even be possible for the results to be beamed directly to a device or cloud service. It's easy enough then to imagine whole sensor networks implemented with simple doodles of electrochemically reactive inks.