Remember Fantastic Voyage, the 1966 sci-fi movie in which a medical team is miniaturised and injected into the body of a dying man aboard a tiny submarine? No one has yet shrunk a surgeon, but Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has come up with the next best thing – a way to remotely control implanted components from outside the body.
Ear and retinal implants help restore hearing or sight by bypassing damaged cells and directly stimulating nerve ends with tiny electrodes. But the tricky part is getting the implant into place and in contact with the nerve endings.
Livermore’s device consists of an implant attached to a silicone tube a few millimetres long. The tube has with gold particles on its tip and a current is passed wirelessly through these to create a patterned magnetic field, which can then be used to manoeuvre the implant remotely.
The implants could be injected near the target site and moved around the patient’s head using an external electromagnet. When the implant is in position the gold particles should also work as electrodes to feed signals from the wires into the nerves.
But what made Livermore stray away from their bread-and-butter weapons research and towards medicine? The clue in the patent is the reference to using the technology to assemble miniaturised weaponry.Read the full patent here.
