Video: Wireless Devices Swim Through Your Bloodstream and Fix You Up, 'Fantastic Voyage' Style

Fantastic Voyage A wireless medical device can move through the bloodstream controlled by a magnetic field. Carlos Suarez, StrongBox3d

Implantable medical devices will eventually dispense drugs, get rid of blood clots and perform micro-surgeries inside our bodies, but powering them could be problematic. If the point is to have minimally invasive gadgets keeping tabs on our health, cutting patients open to swap out their batteries is not an ideal situation.

A new micro device solves that problem elegantly, while upending some assumptions about how our bodies work. It’s powered by induction, which thanks to some new calculations has been shown to work much better in our bodies than anyone thought. All you need is an external radio transmitter to keep it humming.

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Technology, Rebecca Boyle, bloodstream, magnetic induction, mechanical diagnostics, medical devices, medical implants, Video, wireless

In previous research, engineers have assumed device antennas would have to be fairly large to work inside the body and receive a signal through all that tissue and fluid and fat. But it turns out this assumption was wrong, as a Stanford news release explains it.

Poon rethought some calculations, and instead of considering bone and muscle as electrical conductors, she thought of them as a dielectric, a type of insulator. Her calculations showed that while human tissue is a poor conductor, radio waves travel through them 100 times farther than originally thought. So this means antennae could be 100 times smaller than everyone thought, and still be just as powerful. The antenna on the device Poon demonstrated at the conference is just two millimeters square.

She already developed two prototypes, which both create their own propulsion by driving an electrical current through bodily fluid. It may be some time before patients swallow antenna-pills for diagnostic testing, but when they do, they may look a lot like this.

[Stanford Engineering via IEEE Spectrum]