Implantable tech - fact or fiction?

So wearables are very much in vogue at the moment; but is it simply a transition technology to something a little more invasive?

The team at WT Vox think so; believing that it’s only a matter of time before technology moves from outside the body to within it.

They’ve identified the top 10 implantable technologies that may soon be part of your daily life;

1. Implantable smartphones

Researchers are experimenting with embedded sensors that turn human bones into living speakers. Other scientists are working on eye implants that let an image be captured with a blink and transmitted to any local storage (such as an arm-borne RFID chip). But what takes the place of the screen if the phone is inside you? Techs at Autodesk are experimenting with a system that can display images through artificial skin; or the images may appear in your eye implants.

1. Healing chips

Right now, patients are using cyber-implants directly connected to a smartphone app in order to monitor and treat diseases in real time. A new bionic pancreas being tested at America’s Boston University, for instance, has a tiny sensor on an implantable needle that talks directly to a smartphone app to monitor blood-sugar levels for diabetics. Scientists in London are developing swallowable capsule-sized circuits that monitor fat levels in obese patients and generate genetic material that makes them feel “full”.

1. Cyber pills that talk to your doctor

Implantables can talk to your doctor too. In a project named Proteus, a British research team is developing cyber-pills with microprocessors in them that can text doctors directly from inside your body. The pills can help doctors know if you are taking your medication properly and if it is having the desired effect.

1. Bill Gates’ implantable birth control

The Gates Foundation is supporting an MIT project to create an implantable female compu-contraceptive controlled by an external remote control. The tiny chip generates small amounts of contraceptive hormone from within the woman’s body for up to 16 years. Implantation is no more invasive than a tattoo and “the ability to turn it on and off provides a certain convenience factor for those who are planning their family.” said Dr Robert Farra of MIT.

1. Smart tattoos

Tattoos are seemingly ubiquitous, so why not have a smart, digital tattoo can unlock your car or enter mobile phone codes with a finger-point? Researchers at the University of Illinois have crafted an implantable skin mesh of computer fibres thinner than a human hair that can monitor your body’s inner workings from the surface. A company called Dangerous Things, has an NFC chip that can be embedded in a finger through a tattoo-like process, letting you unlock things or enter codes simply by pointing.

1. Brain-computer interface

Having the human brain linked directly to computers is the utopia of sci-fi. But now, a team at Brown University called BrainGate is using an aspirin-sized array of electrodes implanted into the brain, that can be ‘decoded’ by a computer in real-time and used to operate external devices.” Intel predicts practical computer-brain interfaces by 2020.

1. Meltable bio-batteries

One of the challenges for implantable tech has been how to get power to devices tethered inside or floating around in human bodies. You can’t plug them in. You can’t easily take them out to replace a battery. A team at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is working on biodegradable batteries. They generate power inside the body, transfer it wirelessly where needed, and then simply melt away. Another project is looking at how to use the body’s own glucose to generate power for implantables.

1. Smart dust

Perhaps the most startling of current implantable innovations is Smart Dust: Arrays of full computers with antennas, each much smaller than a grain of sand, that can organise themselves inside the body into as-needed networks to power a whole range of complex internal processes. Imagine swarms of these nano-devices, called motes, attacking early cancer or bringing pain relief to a wound or even storing critical personal information in a manner that is deeply encrypted and hard to hack. With smart dust, doctors will be able to act inside your body without opening you up, and information could be stored inside you, deeply encrypted, until you unlocked it from your very personal nano network.

1. The verified self

This technology could be used to ID every single human being. Already, the US military has serious programs afoot to equip soldiers with implanted RFID chips, so keeping track of troops becomes automatic and worldwide. Many social critics believe the expansion of this kind of ID is inevitable. Some see it as a positive: improved crime fighting, universal secure elections, a positive revolution in medical information and response, and never a lost child again. Others see the perfect Orwellian society: a Big Brother who, knowing all and seeing all, can control all.

1. Implantable 3D Smart Organs

The idea behind tissue engineering is that you take plastics, add cells to it, and if you use the right kind of plastics, the right structure and add the right media to the mix, then you have the ability to make skin, bone, or any tissue or organ in the body.

It will be interesting to see which of WT Vox’s top 10 implantables become reality. They’re certainly some complex ethical, security and privacy discussions on the horizon!