At the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) researchers are working on integrating therapeutic drugs into textiles that can release them into the skin as needed. The researchers envision pain medication to be administered as soon as the body severely during a sports injury, or an antibiotic can be released as soon as […]
Tag: Materials
Mechanical Devices Without Any Electronics Self-Report Usage to The Internet
Mechanical devices, particularly 3D printed ones, don’t have much room for electronics and so they remain “dumb” in many ways. Electronics need a power source and integrating them within moving components that are already complex can create greater difficulties. Engineers at the University of Washington have now developed a simple way to make devices, such […]
Drug Releasing Contact Lens Changes Color to Show When Its Working
Drugs designed to treat eye conditions are often delivered via eye drops. Almost all of the actual drug ends up dripping off the eye and not being properly absorbed. Drug releasing contact lenses are the next big thing to treat conditions such as glaucoma, and they may end up being pretty smart in addition to […]
Biodegradable Implant Stimulates Injured Nerves to Speed Up Healing
Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine and Northwestern University created an implant to deliver electric impulses to damaged nerves, helping to heal them, and that eventually biodegrades and leaves the body. It’s about the size of a U.S. quarter coin and operates for about two weeks before losing power and breaking up into microscopic […]
Glow-In-The-Dark Paper Test Rapidly Detects Infectious Diseases
Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands and Keio University in Japan have developed a paper-based diagnostic test, which can be used to rapidly and inexpensively test for a variety of infectious diseases. A clinician can apply a drop of blood to the paper strip and detect the color of the emitted light […]
Thromboresistant Hydrogel Materials for Venous Catheters: Interview with CEO of Access Vascular
Access Vascular, based in Massachusetts, has developed a peripherally inserted central venous catheter (PICC) composed of a thromboresistant hydrogel material. The catheter could reduce the incidence of catheter-related thrombi and resulting adverse events. When a catheter encounters blood, blood cells and proteins begin to accumulate on its surface. The surface material of the catheter, along […]
Specially Designed Batteries for Wearable Devices
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration in Germany have developed a way to pack dense batteries into flexible devices such as wristbands of wearable devices. The technology has the potential to provide the necessary power to medical wearables that will be required by next generation of power hungry multi-sensor devices. The investigators have […]
Stick-On Solar-Powered Heart Monitor Fits on a Finger
Scientists at the Riken, a major Japanese research institute, and University of Tokyo have developed a remarkable ambient light-powered cardiac monitor that looks like a transparent bandage. The underlying technology makes possible other flexible body-worn sensors that don’t need to have an external electric source powering them, including temperature and sweat sensors. Because power is […]
Fuel Cell to Harvest Body’s Glucose as Power Source for Medical Implants
Electronic medical implants typically run on batteries, which have limited lifetimes, require secure enclosures, and take up a lot of space. But a quest has been underway to use glucose, a ubiquitous source of energy used by the body and available nearly everywhere within it, as a fuel to power implantable devices. Researchers at Washington […]
Spray-On Electronic Skin as Tactile Sensor for Prostheses
Prosthetic arms and legs of the future will have tactile sensitivity as a feature, but a lot of work still has to be done to get there. A couple issues that have proven to be engineering challenges is how to cover complex 3D surfaces, such as the hand, with sensors and how to make those […]
Micro-Patterned Cell Culture Platform Reveals Unknown Cancer Behavior
Researchers at Hokkaido University have developed a micro-patterned cell culture platform to study the behavior of pancreatic cancer cells. The new cell culture substrate revealed previously unknown and clinically relevant pancreatic cell behaviors that could help researchers to develop new therapies. “Cancer studies so far either use cell cultures in which cancer cells don’t necessarily […]
Microbubble-Shooting Algae Skeletons Kill Bacterial Biofilms
Biofilms are groups of bacteria that clump together and protect each other. They are the cause of all sorts of infections, and because cleansers and antibiotics have a lot of difficulty dealing with them there’s been a search for new solutions. Though biofilms do form inside the body, they are notorious in the medtech industry […]
New Faster, Cheaper, Better Test Platform for Nucleic Acid Identification of Diseases
At the National University of Singapore, scientists have developed a portable, point-of-care nucleic acid test platform that can be used to diagnose a variety of diseases. It comes in the form of a cartridge that does not need to be kept refrigerated or handled specially in any other way and once used it provides results faster […]
New Fiber Optic Sensor for In Vivo Photoacoustic Imaging
Researchers at Jinan University in China have tinkered with the design of optical fibers to create a novel new type of sensor for photoacoustic imaging. Because the technology uses flexible fibers, it may have applications for implantable, wearable, and diagnostic medical devices. Photoacoustics involves using laser light to create ultrasound waves within tissue. This is […]
Microscopic Implantable Sensors Measure Dopamine in Brain
Dopamine is a neural signaling molecule seemingly involved in nearly every aspect of the brain’s activity. Yet, there hasn’t been a practical way to monitor the long term levels of dopamine in lab animals, let alone in humans. The main problem is that sensors developed so far degrade in the brain within a matter of […]
Looking Deep Into Living Brain Using Photon Counter on Laser Scanning Microscope
New technology has been developed at Tel Aviv University in Israel that significantly improves 2D and 3D imaging of neuronal activity in the brains of living animals. The technology should help make new findings possible about the workings of the brain and how neurological diseases operate. PySight, as the technology is called, uses open-source software […]
Flexible Stick-On Ultrasound Patch Measures Central Blood Pressure
Scientists at the University of California San Diego created a flexible ultrasonic patch that can measure the blood pressure in major vessels such as the jugular vein and carotid artery. The technology has already shown, in a proof-of-concept study, that it may be made as accurate as invasive means to measure the central blood pressure. […]
Transducers Free of Crystals to Make Ultrasound Radically Cheaper
Contemporary ultrasound scanners have piezoelectric crystals inside that are able to generate an electric charge when they’re struck by ultrasonic vibrations. These crystals are really the heart of ultrasound devices, but they’re difficult and expensive to grow. The costs associated with running specialty factories to make crystals is a big reason why ultrasound devices are […]
Microfluidic Device Corrals Viable Sperm for IVF
Researchers at Cornell University have developed a microfluidic device to rapidly isolate the strongest and fastest sperm from a sperm sample. The technique should help technicians during the IVF process, as the current method of isolating the most viable sperm is painstaking and can take hours for the manual effort to pay off. During IVF, […]
Pills to Safely Deliver Therapeutic Micromotors Inside Stomach
A number of researchers around the world are developing tiny micromotors to perform highly targeted tasks within the body. Researchers at University of California San Diego, for example, have developed micromotors that have an antibiotic coating to treat stomach ulcers. Though the technique works great, getting the micromotors to the ulcers without the GI system destroying […]