Tiny Injectable Radios Can Broadcast from Inside the Body
University of Michigan electrical and computer engineers are designing millimeter-scale ultra-low-power sensing systems that can be injected into the body through a syringe. Unlike other radios of this size, these new devices are able to broadcast through the human body to an external receiver. This device came from the researchers responsible for the Michigan Micro Mote (M3) - currently the world's smallest computer - which has enabled a variety of sensors that can fit inside the human body. Now with a radio specifically designed to communicate through tissue, the researchers are adding another level to the computer platform. Real time information can be applied to devices monitoring heart fibrillation as well as glucose monitoring for diabetics. This new radio can transmit information from inside the body up to one foot to a data base receiver, more than 5 times the distance from any known radio of equal size.
Transcript
00:00:00 Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a computer platform small enough to be injectable through a regular-sized syringe. Now they've added a radio strong enough to receive and transmit signals from devices outside the body. This could be a huge step towards early detection for irregular heartbeats or from monitoring glucose levels in diabetics. So what we've been making is tiny little computers that can be implanted and it can monitor things. We have incorporated in our system a radio. Typically in the past, we've only be able to go a couple centimeters of distance that's really small, like this far, now what we've done here is made a new type
00:00:40 of antenna that can go much longer distances but it's still small enough that it can be put inside a syringe. This is a bi-directional radio so we can talk to it and it can talk to us and in fact some of our innovation was how to do that efficiently. This radio was specifically designed to talk through tissue. Electromagnetic radiation, which is how radios typically communicate, doesn't go through tissue but magnetic fields do and so we use magnetic fields to communicate which is similar to something like near field communication like what is used in Apple Pay. The initial test, the initial bring up and verification of the device is done in a
00:01:20 benchtop but at the same time we want to simulate what it's like to be inside the body and talking out. It communicates about a foot outside of the body which is five to 10 x longer than the next best reported number of communicating out of the body for something that small. What that will allow us to do is to then directly talk from the implanted device to for instance your cell phone which is in your pocket. In the past we'd have to get really close to the device we, you know, if you implanted it here, for instance, you'd have to put a reader right there and that's not very convenient now what we can do with this new radio because it
00:01:58 can go this much further is that it could radio to a receiver that's on your nightstand so every night automatically downloads the data because it can reach that far. We get emails from people all the time "this is great, I have this disease or that disease" and "Is there are something that this device can do for that" and that's what drives us on in our research. How does an autonomous car figure out who on the side of the road called it? How does it identify a safe place to pull over? The goal of this project is really to tackle the transportation system challenges in order to turn it into a...