Battery-Free Bioelectronic Implants | Hacker News Reader

Battery-Free Bioelectronic Implants

chemistryworld.com

42 pointsBrajeshwar14 comments

I've always wondered why we can't build devices that process blood sugar into electricity to power themselves. Or blood pressure/flow itself.

I think MIT developed a glucose fuel cell that can take energy from blood. But the safeguards you'd need there (and the ability to ensure it remains clean/usable) are probably a whole lot more complex than building just the fuel cell.

That said, I'd love to have something that could pull a little excess glucose from the ol' bloodstream.

Isn't it easier to eat such that there's no excess in the first place?

But then you wouldn't get cyberpunk, at least till some septic shock happens

No? I mean I'm with you that it sounds like a really bad idea and would probably not end well, but laying on a table so someone can implant a device that handles it for you forever does sound a whole lot easier than having to actively balance your intakes for your entire life.

I totally understand the appeal, hell I'd do it myself if you could give me a guarantee, my problem with it is there is no guarantee and it's 99.9% likely to not actually be safe.

>laying on a table so someone can implant a device that handles it for you forever does sound a whole lot easier than having to actively balance your intakes for your entire life.

Even better would be an implant that not only removes excess glucose (or other material) from your bloodstream, but also monitors your bloodstream for nutrients and tells you the levels of all of them, and lets you know when you're deficient in something. Then you can get a notification on your phone from your implants saying "Warning: your iron level is low. Please eat some beets soon."

Easier? No. Healthier and probably better? Yeah almost certainly.

Not all of us are wired the same. Some of us have neurological deficiencies or disabilities that make regulating food intake very difficult. So I would never presume easier.

I could have chosen a better word than "easier".

I mean, your muscles are pretty good at that, they can even turn that energy into useful work!

Yeah all of the complex chemical reactions our bodies do are handled by structures which self-repair when damaged. Our technology level isn't that advanced yet. Any in body system would almost certainly need to be replaced more often than a battery + inductive charger combo would.

That said, it would be awesome if we could and this research are small stepping stones on that path.

Oh, to be clear, I don't think it's a good idea today or the near future. But it's neat that there's an imaginable world where we can power devices this way.

You got it.

It's because it's hard.

The closest thing we have to this is dialysis, and we need to replace the business end (dialyzer) of the device every treatment.

It's biofouling. The body naturally wants to attack and foul up anything that's not natural. It's a classic problem in implants.

or a heat based circuit ?

Hey, that’s our stuff. we do a ton of different types of battery free stuff beyond this.

Check out bioelectronics.northwestern.edu and rogersgroup.northwestern.edu

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