3M, a leader in the field of adhesives, now offers a variety of products designed for medical applications. The company has been in the medical adhesive business for over 55 years. They offer transparent adhesives, silicone adhesives, smart adhesives and a range of other solutions.
Read more Study Assesses Wearable Device Adhesives for Optimal Fixation
At CES 2019, 3M showcased their latest efforts in medical adhesives.
Silicon adhesives are very gentle and they don’t adhere to hairs. Transparent adhesives are for people who don’t want their bandages to be shown. It’s low profile and transparent.
“Our experience is that it would be easy to think that adhering a medical device to the body is a trivial exercise and what we’re hearing from the marketplace through our experience in findmyadhesive.com is that it’s really helping to simplify what is a pretty complex decision tree for people and help them to funnel down based on their clinical need, the patient type and the application that they require to choose the right adhesive to begin with,” Marcello Napol, Director, medical device development at 3M told Medgadget.
There are trends as the medical wearable space has developed. On one side, there’s a need to extend the wear time of a medical device and the other area is sensitivity.
“In the year and a half or so we launched two products in the extended wear platform for medical wearable adhesives out to 14-days wear time, which is really pushing the envelope for what is physiologically possible, as you know skin regenerates every 14 days. So that’s been really successful,” said Napol.
Silicon adhesives are designed for sensitive skin, younger patients with fragile skins, and the elderly. 3M has also developed adhesives that are unobtrusive.
“Because other things we’re looking at is devices, wearables that are somewhat invisible to our lifestyle. We wanna monitor, but we don’t want something that’s clunky and something that’s really showing. We can take it off easily and it’s gentle to the skin and still provide that low profile and long-term wear solution that people are looking for in their design,” said Tony Kauffman, New Business Development Manager at 3M.
