Not so silly putty

Old-fashioned play putty may just be the future of monitoring bioelectrical activity in the human body. A team of faculty and students in the 2D Bioelectronics Lab found this conductive dough made of flour, water, salt, cream of tartar, and vegetable oil to be just as effective as conventional electrodes in reading brain, heart, muscle, and eye activity—at a small fraction of the price. Plus, the putty can be reused, molded to the body, and combined with more putty to make it cover a larger area. Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Dmitry Kireev and his students conducted the research (no pun intended), and their findings were recently published in Device.