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Rice team makes tiny, magnetically powered neural stimulator (SD)
Rice University neuroengineers have created a tiny surgical implant that can electrically stimulate the brain and nervous system without using a battery or wired power supply.
The neural stimulator draws its power from magnetic energy and is about the size of a grain of rice. It is the first magnetically powered neural stimulator that produces the same kind of high-frequency signals as clinically approved, battery-powered implants that are used to treat epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, chronic pain and other conditions.
[...] The implant's key ingredient is a thin film of "magnetoelectric" material that converts magnetic energy directly into an electrical voltage. The method avoids the drawbacks of radio waves, ultrasound, light and even magnetic coils, all of which have been proposed for powering tiny wireless implants and have been shown to suffer from interference with living tissue or produce harmful amounts of heat.
Magnetoelectric Materials for Miniature, Wireless Neural Stimulation at Therapeutic Frequencies (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2020.05.019) (DX)
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 13 2020, @12:28PM (3 children)
A major concern for people who need brain implants is compatibility with common medical brain scanning machines.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday June 13 2020, @04:48PM
That was my first thought. Everything's looking good...except there seems to be some severe charring rapidly spreading through your frontal cortex.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:29PM (1 child)
TFA says the material vibrates in a magnetic field, which is fascinating. I didn't think you could transmit energy just by having a magnetic field--I thought it had to be a time varying field. It doesn't say if the vibration increases indefinitely with the intensity of the field. If it saturates at some point, the MRI might not be a problem at all. I'm sure they'll test it in the lab, and if it's not MRI compatible they'll weigh the benefits of the implant against that.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 13 2020, @05:51PM
The fun thing about MRIs isn't just the raw field strength, it's also the dynamic gradients and the high energy RF pulses. Any implant with "lead wires" tends to have serious concerns about the RF fields. Even iron bearing tattoos can heat up to painful (rarely injurious) levels.
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