A Bandage That Doesn’t Hurt To Remove, Inspired By Spiderwebs

Fast Co-Exist

These new easy-to-rip-off bandages aren’t just to make your life slightly more convenient. They’re going to play an important role for sick kids in hospitals.

Even the most pain-tolerant people have probably cringed once or twice while ripping an adhesive bandage off a particularly sensitive area. It seems like the kind of thing that intrepid scientists should be able to prevent. Researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital think they can with a new kind of medical tape modeled on the design of spiderwebs.

For adults, removing medical tape is just painful. But for babies, the removal process can break open their skin, sometimes causing permanent scarring. “This is one of the biggest problems faced in the neonatal units, where the patients are helpless and repeatedly wrapped in medical tapes designed for adult skin," explained Bryan Laulicht, one of the researchers behind the project, in a statement.

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