The device also improves on previous "wearable" monitors with higher memory performance, courtesy of gold nanoparticles.

Associate Professor Dawn Rickey’s first realization that lab classes could be more educational came when she was a teaching assistant for California’s cream-of-the-crop chemistry undergrads at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I was really surprised,” Rickey said. “They were really good at the mathematics and plugging the information into the equations, but they didn’t really understand the lab in terms of what was actually happening.”