Electronics
which means they require only minimally invasive injection and removal procedures. Once they’re in, you hardly notice them at all. Unlike wearable devices – smartwatches or fitness trackers – these discreet little implants can’t be lost, are hard to break, and provide, as tests have shown, more reliable data. After the chips were inserted into 36 trial participants – in either the arm, the pectoral, or the lower abdomen – the first task was to determine whether they worked. “Can you read off [the device] using the phone? Can you get temperature values from it?” Andersson recalls asking. “Yes,” he confirms, “the capsule is fully feasible.” In this initial phase, Andersson also measured how participants responded to the implants, asking “is it comfortable enough”? There too, the conclusion is yes. “It’s not difficult to inject these small devices under the skin and it doesn’t really cause any pain or discomfort,” he says. “[Trial participants] graded [pain] on a scale from one to ten – where ten is the most severe discomfort you can imagine, and one is the lightest – and they scored it around two.” Having determined that the technology worked – both technically and physically – the second aim of the trial was to measure the variability of the device. Andersson took three temperature measurements from a single device and scored them against the variability of the results of three measurements from conventional oral and ear methods. “When we compared the variability among the three,” he explains, “it was not statistically different from the variability of the oral and the ear. So that’s really encouraging. There’s nothing in the device that sets off the temperature or anything that makes it uncertain in its reading.” And that’s where Andersson’s involvement in the trial ended. As of yet, he explains, “the longitudinal tests have not been performed with this device”, so it will still be some time before we see injectable chips with a temperature measuring facility on the market.
An even tinier chip
DSruptive Subdermals’ implants are just one technology among many currently at the development stage. One recent research project at Columbia University led to the successful development of the world’s tiniest injectable chip, designed by PhD student Chen Shi.
“The device starts with an ultra-small and ultra-low power temperature sensor integrated circuit chip, and I also managed to build a microscale piezoelectric material directly on top of the chip’s surface through customised microfabrication approaches,” explains Chen. “I also applied a thin layer of biocompatible material to package the device to ensure its endurability and biocompatibility for implantable applications. So, basically, through this monolithic integration – of the sensor chip, and the piece of
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
Detecting Covid-19 with implantable chips
During the rapid outbreak of a virus, people living in close quarters or in constant contact with one another are the perfect vectors for transmission. With their closely packed sleeping quarters and group training drills, military barracks and navy vessels are the perfect environment for a virus to spread. We saw this play out in spring 2020, aboard the SS Theodore Roosevelt after SARS-CoV-2 was discovered onboard following a port visit to Vietnam in late March. The virus travelled quickly, with 1,271 of the ship’s 4,800 crewmates testing positive for the virus between March and April. In response to the threat of naval and other military transmission, the US Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – an organisation created during the Cold War to study emerging technologies for military use – came up with a subdermal Covid-19 diagnostic. One of the researchers behind the device, Dr Matt Hepburn, has described it as a “check engine” light for the body, owing to the fact that it constantly tests the blood of its host for signs of the virus. The downside is that the technology cannot currently differentiate Covid-19 from other viruses, which is why if a virus is detected, an alert signals the fact and the infected is advised to follow up with a more robust diagnostic.
piezoelectric material – I was able to achieve an extremely small size of only 0.065mm2 size of a dust mite.”
, which is the
Whereas the DSruptive Subdermals chip is powered by a smartphone, Chen’s dust-size microchip relies on ultrasound energy. “The device is wirelessly powered by ultrasound,” he explains, “and also transmits sensor data through ultrasound.” That means the device, as astoundingly futuristic as it might be, works with conventional medical imaging technology.
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