Worried about the government spying on you through implants? Well, I don’t know if your dental fillings are secret radios, but MIT and Harvard are definitely trying to keep tabs on your cancer. Their joint Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE) has developed and tested a small cylindrical implant that monitors the growth of tumors. Dr. Michael J. Cima and his team believe the implant can help doctors monitor hormones, chemotherapy agents, acidity, and oxygen levels that are key indicators of cancerous growths. No longer will surgeons have to wonder if their excisions are successful.
This tiny implant is able to monitor important chemicals near a tumor.
The little implant works in a really cool way. Only five millimeters long, the cylinder contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies. These antibodies will bond to whichever chemical the implant is designed to monitor. A semi-permeable membrane keeps the nanoparticles in the implant while still allowing ambient particles in and out. When the antibodies bond to a chemical they form clumps. These clumps are then read using an MRI.
The face of war is changing, and it may no longer be a human one. Developing new technology has always been a cornerstone of a successful military force, but now those technologies are steadily moving human soldiers from combat to management positions. Virtually every major military power is working on robotic weapons. In short, we’re outsourcing more and more of war into the hands of robots and computers. Even the conventional foot soldier has robotic and biological augmentation in his/her future. Today, Singularity Hub is taking a wide-angle look at these changes and how they will change the nature of war and our world.
Release the Drones
Forget the future for a moment, and just consider our present. The U.S. military employs more than 7000 unmanned drones in operations all over the world. Even just 15 years ago, the number of active drones was just a few dozen at most. Now, the use of Predator drones is regularly covered by major media outlets. The Predator, an unmanned, remotely flown drone capable of delivering explosive payloads, is able to seek out and destroy hostile targets thousands of miles from the soldier controlling it. A Raven drone, another Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), is capable of short range reconnaissance and lightweight enough to be carried into the field by a foot soldier. See the video after the break.
These UAVs are just the tip of the drone iceberg. Besides specialized anti-munitions drones, defense turrets, and surveillance drones already in use, the U.S. military is developing rolling ground vehicles, water surface vehicles, and remote bombers that could all see action in the next few years. There are several competing models for each category, but the Crusher (ground), X-45 (air), and USV (water) are advanced enough to have videos available on the web. Each of these drones would be piloted by controllers many miles away from the field (eventually even from the other side of the world). Closer to home, pocket sized reconnaissance drones may become a part of every soldier’s arsenal (like the Ember from iRobot we talked about recently) , allowing them to explore dangerous areas without risking their own skin.
Modern medicine may not have reached the level of the Bionic Woman, but intestinal implants are turning more and more diabetics into low-grade cyborgs. The device in question is Enterra ®, a neurostimulator from Medtronic, that treats gastroparesis. This stomach disorder effects up to 1 in 5 diabetics and basically prevents food from progressing through the GI tract. Non-diabetics can develop the disorder from surgery, medicine reactions, or auto-immune diseases. With the implant, however, most patients can hope to reduce many of gastroparesis’ nastier symptoms like bloating, nausea, and vomiting.
The Enterra neurostimulator implant as seen after installation. Photo from botjunkie.com
It takes general anesthesia and surgery to place the Enterra ® device, but afterwards doctors can adjust it externally, using a remote apparatus. Not a bad trick, and one that allows patients to avoid further invasive procedures. While it may take a little more work to install than other implants (did you know that a pacemaker only requires local anesthesia nowadays?) it has benefited from their popularity. Medtronic received special humanitarian device exemption (HDE) from the US FDA for Enterra ®. This means that while the device’s benefits haven’t been proven rigorously, the FDA is willing to let it be placed in patients. All it takes is a facility’s institutional review board to approve the device, and many have already done so.
Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body’s medical status? Years from now people will look back and find it unbelievable that heart attacks, strokes, hormone imbalances, sugar levels, and hundreds of other bodily vital signs and malfunctions were not being continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants. We can call this concept body 2.0, or the networked body, and we need it now!
The trio of biomedicine, technology, and wireless communication are in the midst of a merger that will easily bring continuous, 24×7 monitoring of several crucial bodily functions in the years ahead. Unfortunately, as is often the case with medical products, the needed innovations are either already developed or will be soon, but some of the best commercial products won’t make it to the market until years of testing have proven their safety.
In the future your doctor might call you before you have a heart attack, responding to an alarm sent out by monitoring systems in your body that have detected the precursors to a heart attack hours or days ahead of time. With body 2.0, medicine dosages could be tailored precisely to your body chemistry and metabolism. Real-time monitoring of chemical concentrations in your blood could allow for increasing or decreasing dosages accordingly.
The huge amounts of data that would be accumulated from hundreds of thousands of continuously monitored people would be nothing short of a revolution for medical research and analysis. This data could be harvested to understand the minute by minute changes in body chemistry that occur in response to medication, stress, infection, and so on. As an example, the daily fluctuations in hormone levels of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be tracked and charted 24/7 to determine a baseline from which abnormalities and patterns could be extracted. The possibilities are enormous.
Given the advantages, we must wonder why body monitoring is not already more successful and widespread. The answer is that most of the interesting body monitoring we desire requires direct access to the blood stream and other bodily fluids, and this is not an easy problem to overcome.
A straightforward technique is to prick the skin periodically to extract and analyze blood, yet this only works for periodic monitoring. It does not provide continuous access to bodily fluids. Sensors implanted permanently into the blood stream are what is needed, but the difficulty is that moisture, enzymes, and the immune system quickly wreak havoc on mechanical devices and destroy them. Implants also pose several opportunities for life threatening infection to take hold, and this must be addressed.
The video below opens our eyes to the possibilities:
Although the road to continuous body monitoring poses challenges, these challenges are certainly within our means to overcome, and exciting progress is being made all over the world. The medical monitoring, device, and implant space is absolutely enormous, so there is no way we can do justice to the myriad of companies and research projects that are out there. Nevertheless, here are a few of the companies and products that we are aware of:
Proteus Biomedical:
One of the biggest names in the industry is a company we have reported on before, Proteus Biomedical…
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