At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, skincare brand L’Oreal debuted its My UV Patch, a stretchable skin sensor designed to monitor UV exposure and help consumers educate themselves about sun protection.

The patch will be introduced by L’Oreal’s dermatological skincare brand, La Roche-Posay, and is a transparent adhesive that stretches and sticks directly to any area of skin that consumers want to monitor. It is expected to be made available to consumers later this year.

Measuring approximately one square inch (6.25sq cm) in area and 50 micrometers thick – half the thickness of an average strand of hair – the patch contains photosensitive dyes that factor in the baseline skin tone and change colours when exposed to UV rays to indicate varying levels of sun exposure.

Consumers must take a photo of the patch and upload it to the La Roche-Posay My UV Patch mobile app, which analyses the varying photosensitive dye squares to determine the amount of UV exposure the wearer has received.

“Connected technologies have the potential to completely disrupt how we monitor the skin’s exposure to various external factors, including UV,” said Guive Balooch, global vice president of L’Oreal’s Technology Incubator.

“Previous technologies could only tell users the amount of potential sun exposure they were receiving per hour while wearing a rigid, non-stretchable device. The key was to design a sensor that was thin, comfortable and virtually weightless so people would actually want to wear it.”

Spa Business identified the field of invisibles – the next generation of wearables, which will integrate sensors into the body to give a complete picture of our health – as one of its 2015 Spa Foresight trends.