NIH Director's Blog

Wearable electronic sensors hold tremendous promise for improving human health and wellness. That promise already runs the gamut from real-time monitoring of blood pressure and abnormal heart rhythms to measuring alcohol consumption and even administering vaccines.

Each year, more than 2.8 million people in the United States develop bacterial infections that don’t respond to treatment and sometimes turn life-threatening [1]. Their infections are antibiotic-resistant, meaning the bacteria have changed in ways that allow them to withstand our current widely used arsenal of antibiotics. It’s a serious and growing health-care problem here and around the world. To fight back, doctors desperately need new antibiotics, including novel classes of drugs that bacteria haven’t seen and developed ways to resist.