It’s only a centimetre long, it’s placed under your skin, it’s powered by a patch on the surface of your skin and it communicates with your mobile phone. The new biosensor chip developed at EPFL is capable of simultaneously monitoring the concentration of a number of molecules, such as glucose and cholesterol, and certain drugs.
If you’ve ever wondered what’s been happening with implantables, the chip described above is a good example. You can learn more about it here.
I find it pretty genius that they’ve put the battery on a patch that’s on the surface of your skin. The battery is the biggest problem with leaving implantables in very long. I’m also interested in how much impact having a foreign object under your skin will have on your body, but I think we basically know about those challenges thanks to pacemakers and other devices that we’ve been putting in bodies for years.
I also love that this implantable can monitor pH, temperature, lactate, cholesterol, and drugs. The last one is extremely interesting for me since it opens up all sorts of new research opportunities along with monitoring opportunities. You could use the drug monitoring to improve how much drug is needed, but you could also identify when there’s been an error in the dosing for some reason.
No doubt I’m a novice in this area, but I find these trends fascinating. The clinical trials on this device are going to take 3-5 years, but I’m glad we’re getting started.
