You’re looking at an amazing medical advancement, a protective patch that guides the way cells heal after shoulder surgery. It’s made from microfibers 100 times finer than human hair, and it completely disintegrates to prevent long-term complications. Believe it or not, all that medical tech is constructed the very old-fashioned way: by hand, on a wooden loom.
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Rich Lee has freed himself from the frustrations of misplacing or having to untangle his headphones ever again. How? He’s what’s known as a grinder: someone who experiments with surgical implants or body-enhancements, and he’s come up with a doozie. Implanted in his tragus—the stiff protrusion just in front of your ear canal—is a small magnet that works like an earbud built into his head.
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While doctors have experimented with 3D-printed prosthetics in the past, none has been quite as prominent or incredibly detailed as Eric Moger’s newest addition: a prosthetic, 3D-printed face. More »
We’ve got plenty of devices that track stats on the outside of our bodies and send the numbers to our phones, but how about one that goes under your skin and bathes in blood? A chip developed by a team of Swiss scientists does just that; it’s a Fitbit for under your skin. Sorta. More »
Batteries used to be the only way to power implantable gadgets, but additional surgeries are needed to replace the power packs once their juice runs out — a less-than-ideal solution for patients. Recent discoveries, however, have such medgadgets being powered by photons, hip hop and now high-frequency radio waves. Electrical engineers at Stanford built a cardiac device that uses a combination of inductive and radiative transmission of power, at about 1.7 billion cycles per second, to its coiled receiving antenna.
Previous prevailing opinion held that the high frequencies needed for wireless power delivery couldn’t penetrate the human body deep enough, and the lower frequencies that would do the trick require antennas too large to work as implants. That conundrum was solved by getting the high-frequency signals to penetrate deeper using alternating waves of electric and magnetic fields. That allowed a 10x increase in power delivery — up to 50 microwatts to a millimeter radius antenna coil — to an implant five centimeters below the skin. That antenna also was also designed to pull power regardless of its orientation, making it ideal for applications inside always-moving human bodies. Of course, the implant’s really just a proof-of-concept at this stage, but hopefully it won’t be long before battery powered implants go the way of the dodo TouchPad.
Filed under: Science
Stanford researchers make heart implant powered by radio waves, put batteries out of a job originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Sep 2012 23:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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