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posted by martyb on Saturday June 13 2020, @07:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-foil-cap-for-you! dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @05:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @05:19AM (#1007674)

    From Wikipedia:

    In its most general form, the magnetoelectric effect (ME) denotes any coupling between the magnetic and the electric properties of a material.[1][2] The first example of such an effect was described by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1888, who found that a dielectric material moving through an electric field would become magnetized.[3] A material where such a coupling is intrinsically present is called a magnetoelectric.