It’s not always easy to prevent sunburn—an entire skincare industry still hasn’t figured out a foolproof solution outside never leaving your home or permanently looking like a lifeguard. But Chinese researchers have just designed a new wearable device that can absorb the sun’s rays and tell you if you’re at risk for a sunburn, offering an a surprisingly efficient way of protecting people from the sun’s rays and mitigating the chances of worse problems like skin cancer from arising over time.
The device, outlined in a new study published on Tuesday in the journal Matter, uses a neural network to identify the weather and send real-time data to your phone about how much ultraviolet radiation it’s receiving.
By definition, ultraviolet (or UV) radiation isn’t visible—cloudy days offer some reduction in UV exposure, as does one’s distance from the equator, but it’s difficult to know for certain the strength of UV rays on a given day. UV radiation, the authors wrote in the study, is a “double-edge sword to human beings,” because it stimulates the necessary production of vitamin D but leads to sunburn, wrinkles, and skin cancer in excess.
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The researchers combined a mineral called a perovskite—which is often used in solar panels to absorb light—with quantum dots. These are tiny semiconductor particles that have also been used, for instance, to make televisions with enhanced colors. Together, these two materials absorbed UV radiation from the sun and converted it into a signal in a circuit, telling the device the strength of the radiation. The device then sent these measurements to a cell phone via Bluetooth.
Based on its measurements, the researchers determined that they could also use the device like a real-time meteorologist. UV radiation data fed into a neural network and classified the weather as either sunny or overcast. After approximately 100 training sessions, the device’s weather determinations were more than 80 percent accurate, and its accuracy continued to increase over time to over 90 percent.
Not only could the device help humans know when to reapply sunscreen, it could aid agriculture, too. The researchers strapped the device to a plant as one of their tests and described a futuristic smart greenhouse informed by UV data collection. Readouts from the device, they imagine, could program UV lamps to turn on when radiation fell beneath a certain intensity, and turn off when the plants are getting enough light.
But those other applications may still need some work testing and developing. In the meantime, any effort to lower the prevalence of a deadly skin cancer like melanoma, where 86 percent of cases are caused by UV exposure from the sun, is a worthy aspiration.
