New Frontiers for Drug Delivery | NuFabrx

NuFabrx | New Frontiers for Drug Delivery Margaret Monaco and Ngoc Nguyen

Imagine a world in which you didn’t have to take medication for your everyday aches and pains. Instead of taking a pill, what if you could simply put on a piece of clothing? Well you can! NuFabrx is a company that specializes in creating medicated garments infused with capsaicin and CBD to provide long lasting pain relief. NuFabrx tasked our team with developing a wash cycle sensor that will indicate to the consumer when the medication has depleted from the garment, after 25 washes. By exploring the feasibility of various concepts, we decided to create a sensor that utilized dye degradation.

In choosing this concept, we created a unique system that shows a distinct change, has a low price, is comfortable, and is washable. Over the past year, we learned a lot about product development through the design process. The project started off with a benchmarking and ideation phase. Since our product was a new concept, we had to think about Imageparallel technologies that mirrored the mechanisms we were seeking, so we decided to focus on products that were designed to change or fail with time. At the conclusion of the benchmarking phase, we decided to move forward with a multi-component dye degradation sensor that visually indicated 5, 15, and 25 wash cycles. The Imagemulti-component dye degradation sensor was created by using three separate dye systems that either used a combination of two dyes or one single dye. Before determining which dye degradation systems to move forward with, we evaluated different individual dyes to determine their rates of change and researched how the perception of color changed with age to find what colors minimized perception errors. Image This project taught our team about the science behind color chemistry as well as how color perception differs between different consumer age groups.