Elemind, a 5-year-old startup based in Cambridge, Mass., today unveiled a US $349 wearable for neuromodulation, the company’s first product. According to cofounder and CEO Meredith Perry, the technology tracks the oscillation of brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG) sensors that detect the electrical activity of the brain and then influence those oscillations using bursts of sound delivered via bone conduction.

Elemind’s first application for this wearable aims to suppress alpha waves to help induce sleep. There are other wearables on the market that monitor brain waves and, through biofeedback, encourage users to actively modify their alpha patterns. Elemind’s headband appears to be the first device to use sound to directly influence the brain waves of a passive user.

In a clinical trial, says Perry [no relation to author], 76 percent of subjects fell asleep more quickly. Those who did see a difference averaged 48 percent less time to progress from awake to asleep. The results were similar to those of comparable trials of pharmaceutical sleep aids, Perry indicated.

“For me,” Perry said, “it cuts through my rumination, quiets my thinking. It’s like noise cancellation for the brain.”

I briefly tested Elemind’s headband in May. I found it comfortable, with a thick cushioned band that sits across the forehead connected to a stretchy elastic loop to keep it in place. In the band are multiple EEG electrodes, a processor, a three-axis accelerometer, a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery, and custom electronics that gather the brain’s electrical signals, estimate their phase, and generate pink noise through a bone-conduction speaker. The whole thing weighs about 60 grams—about as much as a small kiwi fruit.

My test conditions were far from optimal for sleep: early afternoon, a fairly bright conference room, a beanbag chair as bed, and a vent blowing. And my test lasted just 4 minutes. I can say that I didn’t find the little bursts of pink noise (white noise without the higher frequencies) unpleasant. And since I often wear an eye mask, feeling fabric on my face wasn’t disturbing. It wasn’t the time or place to try for sound sleep, but I—and the others in the room—noted that after 2 minutes I was yawning like crazy.

How Elemind tweaks brain waves

What was going on in my brain? Briefly, different brain states are associated with different frequencies of waves. Someone who is relaxed with eyes closed but not asleep produces alpha waves at around 10 hertz. As they drift off to sleep, the alpha waves are supplanted by theta waves, at around 5 Hz. Eventually, the delta waves of deep sleep show up at around 1 Hz.

Ryan Neely, Elemind’s vice president of science and research, explains: “As soon as you put the headband on,” he says, “the EEG system starts running. It uses straightforward signal processing with bandpass filtering to isolate the activity in the 8- to 12-Hz frequency range—the alpha band.”

“Then,” Neely continues, “our algorithm looks at the filtered signal to identify the phase of each oscillation and determines when to generate bursts of pink noise.”

To help a user fall asleep more quickly [top], bursts of pink noise are timed to generate a brain response that is out of phase with alpha waves and so suppresses them. To enhance deep sleep [bottom], the pink noise is timed to generate a brain response that is in phase with delta waves.Source: Elemind

These auditory stimuli, he explains, create ripples in the waves coming from the brain. Elemind’s system tries to align these ripples with a particular phase in the wave. Because there is a gap between the stimulus and the evoked response, Elemind tested its system on 21 people and calculated the average delay, taking that into account when determining when to trigger a sound.

To induce sleep, Elemind’s headband targets the trough in the alpha wave, the point at which the brain is most excitable, Neely says.

“You can think of the alpha rhythm as a gate for communication between different areas of the brain,” he says. “By interfering with that communication, that coordination between different brain areas, you can disrupt patterns, like the ruminations that keep you awake.”

With these alpha waves suppressed, Neely says, the slower oscillations, like the theta waves of light sleep, take over.

Elemind doesn’t plan to stop there. The company plans to add an algorithm that addresses delta waves, the low-frequency 0.5- to 2-Hz waves characteristic of deep sleep. Here, Elemind’s technology will attempt to amplify this pattern with the intent of improving sleep quality.

Is this safe? Yes, Neely says, because auditory stimulation is self-limiting. “Your brain waves have a natural space they can occupy,” he explains, “and this stimulation just moved it within that natural space, unlike deep-brain stimulation, which can move the brain activity outside natural parameters.”

Going beyond sleep to sedation, memory, and mental health

Applications may eventually go beyond inducing and enhancing sleep. Researchers at the University of Washington and McGill University have completed a clinical study to determine if Elemind’s technology can be used to increase the pain threshold of subjects undergoing sedation. The results are being prepared for peer review.

Elemind is also working with a team involving researchers at McGill and the Leuven Brain Institute to determine if the technology can enhance memory consolidation in deep sleep and perhaps have some usefulness for people with mild cognitive impairment and other memory disorders.

Neely would love to see more applications investigated in the future.

“Inverse alpha stimulation [enhancing instead of suppressing the signal] could increase arousal,” he says. “That’s something I’d love to look into. And looking into mental-health treatment would be interesting, because phase coupling between the different brain regions appears to be an important factor in depression and anxiety disorders.”

Perry, who previously founded the wireless power startup UBeam, cofounded Elemind with four university professors with expertise in neuroscience, optogenetics, biomedical engineering, and artificial intelligence. The company has $12 million in funding to date and currently has 13 employees.

Preorders at $349 start today for beta units, and Elemind expects to start general sales later this year. The company will offer customers an optional membership at $7 to $13 monthly that will allow cloud storage of sleep data and access to new apps as they are released.

A thimbleful of soil can contain a universe of microorganisms, up to 10 billion by some estimates. Now a group of researchers in Bath, United Kingdom, are building prototype technologies that harvest electrons exhaled by some micro-species.

The idea is to power up low-yield sensors and switches, and perhaps help farmers digitally optimize crop yields to meet increasing demand and more and more stressful growing conditions. There could be other tasks, too, that might make use of a plant-and-forget, low-yield power source—such as monitoring canals for illegal waste dumping.

The research started small, based out of the University of Bath, with field-testing in a Brazilian primary school classroom and a green pond near it—just before the onset of the pandemic.

“We had no idea what the surroundings would be. We just packed the equipment we needed and went,” says Jakub Dziegielowski, a University of Bath, U.K. chemical engineering Ph.D. student. “And the pond was right by the school—it was definitely polluted, very green, with living creatures in it, and definitely not something I’d feel comfortable drinking from. So it got the job done.”

The experiments they did along with kids from the school and Brazilian researchers that summer of 2019 were aimed at running water purifiers. It did so. However, it also wasn’t very efficient, compared to, say, a solar panel.

So work has moved on in the Bath labs: in the next weeks, Dziegielowski will both turn 29 and graduate with his doctorate. And he, along with two other University of Bath advisors and colleagues recently launched a spinoff company—it’s called Bactery—to perfect a prototype for a network of soil microbial fuel cells for use in agriculture.

A microbial fuel cell is a kind of power plant that converts chemical energy stored in organic molecules into electrical energy, using microbes as a catalyst. It’s more often used to refer to liquid-based systems, Dziegielowski says. Organics from wastewater serve as the energy source, and the liquid stream mixes past the electrodes.

A soil microbial fuel cell, however, has one of its electrodes—the anode, which absorbs electrons—in the dirt. The other electrode, the cathode, is exposed to air. Batteries work because ions move through an electrolyte between electrodes to complete a circuit. In this case, the soil itself acts as the electrolyte—as well as source of the catalytic microbes, and as the source of the fuel.

The Bath, U.K.-based startup Bactery has developed a set up fuel cells powered by microbes in the soil—with, in the prototype pictured here, graphite mats as electrodes. University of Bath

Fields full of Watts

In a primary school in the fishing village of Icapuí on Brazil’s semi-arid northeastern coast, the group made use of basic components: graphite felt mats acting as electrodes, and nylon pegs to maintain spacing and alignment between them. (Bactery is now developing new kinds of casing.)

By setting up the cells in a parallel matrix, the Icapuí setup could generate 38 milliwatts per square meter. In work since, the Bath group’s been able to reach 200 milliwatts per square meter.

Electroactive bacteria—also called exoelectrogens or electricigens—take in soluble iron or acids or sugar and exhale electrons. There are dozens of species of microbes that can do this, including bacteria belonging to genera such as Geobacter and Shewanella. There are many others.

But 200 milliwatts per square meter is not a lot of juice: enough to charge a mobile phone, maybe, or keep an LED nightlight going—or, perhaps, serve as a power source for sensors or irrigation switches. “As in so many things, it comes down to the economics,” says Bruce Logan, an environmental engineer at Penn State who wrote a 2007 book, Microbial Fuel Cells.

A decade ago Palo Alto engineers launched the MudWatt, a self-contained kit that could light a small LED. It’s mostly marketed as a school science project. But even now, some 760 million people do not have reliable access to electricity. “In remote areas, soil microbial fuel cells with higher conversion and power management efficiencies would fare better than batteries,” says Sheela Berchmans, a retired chief scientist of the Central Electrochemical Research Institute in Tamil Nadu, India.

Korneel Rabaey, professor in the department of biotechnology at the University of Ghent, in Belgium, says electrochemical micro-power sources—a category that now includes the Bactery battery—is gaining buzz in resource recovery, for uses such as extracting pollutants from wastewater, with electricity as a byproduct. “You can think of many applications that don’t require a lot of power,” he says, “But where sensors are important.”

For the first time, a small group of patients with amputations below the knee were able to control the movements of their prosthetic legs through neural signals—rather than relying on programmed cycles for all or part of a motion—and resume walking with a natural gait. The achievement required a specialized amputation surgery combined with a non-invasive surface electrode connection to a robotic prosthetic lower leg. A study describing the technologies was published today in the journal Nature Medicine.

“What happens then is quite miraculous. The patients that have this neural interface are able to walk at normal speeds; and up and down steps and slopes; and maneuver obstacles really without thinking about it. It’s natural. It’s involuntary,” said co-author Hugh Herr, who develops bionic prosthetics at the MIT Media Lab. “Even though their limb is made of titanium and silicone—all these various electromechanical components—the limb feels natural and it moves naturally, even without conscious thought.”

The approach relies on surgery at the amputation site to create what the researchers call an agonist-antagonist myoneural Interface, or AMI. The procedure involves connecting pairs of muscles (in the case of below-the-knee amputation, two pairs), as well as the introduction of proprietary synthetic elements.

The interface creates a two-way connection between body and machine. Muscle-sensing electrodes send signals to a small computer in the prosthetic limb that interprets them as angles and forces for joints at the ankle and ball of the foot. It also sends information back about the position of the artificial leg, restoring a sense of where the limb is in space, also known as proprioception.

Video 1 www.youtube.com

“The particular mode of control is far beyond what anybody else has come up with,” said Daniel Ferris, a neuromechanical engineer at the University of Florida; Ferris was not involved in the study, but has worked on neural interfaces for controlling lower limb prostheses. “It’s a really novel idea that they’ve built on over the last eight years that’s showing really positive outcomes for better bionic lower legs.” The latest publication is notable for a larger participant pool than previous studies, with seven treatment patients and seven control patients with amputations and typical prosthetic legs.

To test the bionic legs, patients were asked to walk on level ground at different speeds; up and down slopes and stairs; and to maneuver around obstacles. The AMI users had a more natural gait, more closely resembling movement by someone using a natural limb. More naturalistic motion can improve freedom of movement, particularly over challenging terrain, but in other studies researchers have also noted reduced energetic costs, reduced stress on the body, and even social benefits for some amputees.

Co-author Hyungeun Song, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, says the group was surprised by the efficiency of the bionic setup. The prosthetic interface sent just 18 percent of the typical amount of information that’s sent from a limb to the spine, yet it was enough to allow patients to walk with what was considered a normal gait.

Next Steps for the Bionic Leg

AMI amputations have now become the standard at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts, where co-author Matthew Carty works. And because of patient benefits in terms of pain and ease of using even passive (or non-robotic) prosthetics, this technique—or something similar—could spread well beyond the current research setting. To date, roughly 60 people worldwide have received AMI surgery above or below either an elbow or knee.

In principle, Herr said, someone with a previously amputated limb, such as himself, could undergo AMI rehabilitation, and he is strongly considering the procedure. More than 2 million Americans are currently living with a lost limb, according to the Amputee Coalition, and nearly 200,000 lower legs are amputated each year in the United States.

On the robotics side, there are already commercial leg prosthetics that could be made compatible with the neural interface. The area in greatest need of development is the connection between amputation site and prosthesis. Herr says commercialization of that interface might be around five years away.

Herr says his long-term goal is neural integration and embodiment: the sense that a prosthetic is part of the body, rather than a tool. The new study “is a critical step forward—pun intended.”

In the United States alone, more than 100,000 people currently need a lifesaving organ transplant. Instead of waiting for donors, one way to solve this crisis in the future is to assemble replacement organs with bio-printing—3D printing that uses inks containing living cells. Scientists in Israel have found that origami techniques could help fold sensors into bio-printed materials to help determine whether they are behaving safely and properly.

Although bio-printing something as complex as a human organ is still a distant possibility, there are a host of near-term applications for the technique. For example, in drug research, scientists can bio-print living, three-dimensional tissues with which to examine the effects of various compounds.

Ideally, researchers would like to embed sensors within bio-printed items to keep track of how well they are behaving. However, the three-dimensional nature of bio-printed objects makes it difficult to lodge sensors within them in a way that can monitor every part of the structures.

“It will, hopefully in the future, allow us to monitor and assess 3D biostructures before we would like to transplant them.” —Ben Maoz, Tel Aviv University

Now scientists have developed a 3D platform inspired by origami that can help embed sensors in bio-printed objects in precise locations. “It will, hopefully in the future, allow us to monitor and assess 3D biostructures before we would like to transplant them,” says Ben Maoz, a professor of biomedical engineering at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

The new platform is a silicone rubber device that can fold around a bio-printed structure. The prototype holds a commercial array of 3D electrodes to capture electrical signals. It also possesses other electrodes that can measure electrical resistance, which can reveal how permeable cells are to various medications. A custom 3D software model can tailor the design of the origami and all the electrodes so that the sensors can be placed in specific locations in the bio-printed object.

The scientists tested their device on bio-printed clumps of brain cells. The research team also grew a layer of cells onto the origami that mimicked the blood-brain barrier, a cell layer that protects the brain from undesirable substances that the body’s blood might be carrying. By folding this combination of origami and cells onto the bio-printed structures, Maoz and his colleagues were able to monitor neural activity within the brain cells and see how their synthetic blood-brain barrier might interfere with medications intended to treat brain diseases.

Maoz says the new device can incorporate many types of sensors beyond electrodes, such as temperature or acidity sensors. It can also incorporate flowing liquid to supply oxygen and nutrients to cells, the researchers note.

Currently, this device “will mainly be used for research and not for clinical use,” Maoz says. Still, it could “significantly contribute to drug development—assessing drugs that are relevant to the brain.”

The researchers say they can use their origami device with any type of 3D tissue. For example, Maoz says they can use it on bio-printed structures made from patient cells “to help with personalized medicine and drug development.”

The origami platform could also help embed devices that can modify bio-printed objects. For instance, many artificially grown tissues function better if they are placed under the kinds of physical stresses they might normally experience within the body, and the origami platform could integrate gadgets that can exert such mechanical forces on bio-printed structures. “This can assist in accelerating tissue maturation, which might be relevant to clinical applications,” Maoz says.

The scientists detailed their findings in the 26 June issue of Advanced Science.

A Barcelona-based startup called Inbrain Neuroelectronics has produced a novel brain implant made of graphene and is gearing up for its first in-human test this summer.

The technology is a type of brain-computer interface. BCIs have garnered interest because they record signals from the brain and transmit them to a computer for analysis. They have been used for medical diagnostics, as communication devices for people who can’t speak, and to control external equipment, including robotic limbs. But Inbrain intends to transform its BCI technology into a therapeutic tool for patients with neurological issues such as Parkinson’s disease.

Because Inbrain’s chip is made of graphene, the neural interface has some interesting properties, including the ability to be used to both record from and stimulate the brain. That bidirectionality comes from addressing a key problem with the metallic chips typically used in BCI technology: Faradaic reactions. Faradaic reactions are a particular type of electrochemical processes that occurs between a metal electrode and an electrolyte solution. As it so happens, neural tissue is largely composed of aqueous electrolytes. Over time, these Faradaic reactions reduce the effectiveness of the metallic chips.

That’s why Inbrain replaced the metals typically used in such chips with graphene, a material with great electrical conductivity. “Metals have Faraday reactions that actually make all the electrons interact with each other, degrading their effectiveness...for transmitting signals back to the brain,” said Carolina Aguilar, CEO and cofounder of Inbrain.

Because graphene is essentially carbon and not a metal, Aguilar says the chip can inject 200 times as much charge without creating a Faradic reaction. As a result, the material is stable over the millions of pulses of stimulation required of a therapeutic tool. While Inbrain is not yet testing the chip for brain stimulation, the company expects to reach that goal in due time.

The graphene-based chip is produced on a wafer using traditional semiconductor technology, according to Aguilar. At clean-room facilities, Inbrain fabricates a 10-micrometer-thick chip. The chip consists of what Aguilar terms “graphene dots” (not to be confused with graphene quantum dots) that range in size from 25 to 300 micrometers. “This micrometer scale allows us to get that unique resolution on the decoding of the signals from the brain, and also provides us with the micrometric stimulation or modulation of the brain,” added Aguilar.

Testing the Graphene-Based BCI

The first test of the platform in a human patient will soon be performed at the University of Manchester, in England, where it will serve as an interface during the resection of a brain tumor. When resecting a tumor, surgeons must ensure that they don’t damage areas like the brain’s language centers so the patient isn’t impaired after the surgery. “The chip is positioned during the tumor resection so that it can read, at a very high resolution, the signals that tell the surgeon where there is a tumor and where there is not a tumor,” says Aguilar. That should enable the surgeons to extract the tumor with micrometric precision while preserving functional areas like speech and cognition.

Aguilar added, “We have taken this approach for our first human test because it is a very reliable and quick path to prove the safety of graphene, but also demonstrate the potential of what it can do in comparison to metal technology that is used today.”

Aguilar stresses that the Inbrain team has already tested the graphene-based chip’s biocompatibility. “We have been working for the last three years in biocompatibility through various safety studies in large animals,” said Aguilar. “So now we can have these green lights to prove an additional level of safety with humans.”

While this test of the chip at Manchester is aimed at aiding in brain tumor surgery, the same technology could eventually be used to help Parkinson’s patients. Toward this aim, Inbrain’s system was granted Breakthrough Device Designation last September from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration as an adjunctive therapy for treating Parkinson’s disease. “For Parkinson’s treatment, we have been working on different preclinical studies that have shown reasonable proof of superiority versus current commercial technology in the [reduction] of Parkinson’s disease symptoms,” said Aguilar.

For treating Parkinson’s, Inbrain’s chip connects with the nigrostriatal pathway in the brain that is critical for movements. The chip will first decode the intention message from the brain that triggers a step or the lifting of the arm—something that a typical BCI can do. But Inbrain’s chip, with its micrometric precision, can also decode pathological biomarkers related to Parkinson’s symptoms, such as tremors, rigidity, and freezing of the gait.

By determining these biomarkers with great precision, Inbrain’s technology can determine how well a patient’s current drug regimen is working. In this first iteration of the Inbrain chip, it doesn’t treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s directly, but instead makes it possible to better target and reduce the amount of drugs that are used in treatment.

“Parkinson’s patients take huge amounts of drugs that have to be changed over time just to keep up with the growing resistance patients develop to the power of the drug,” said Aguilar. “We can reduce it at least 50 percent and hopefully in the future more as our devices become precise.”

Cochlear implants—the neural prosthetic cousins of standard hearing aids—can be a tremendous boon for people with profound hearing loss. But many would-be users are turned off by the device’s cumbersome external hardware, which must be worn to process signals passing through the implant. So researchers have been working to make a cochlear implant that sits entirely inside the ear, to restore speech and sound perception without the lifestyle restrictions imposed by current devices.

A new biocompatible microphone offers a bridge to such fully internal cochlear implants. About the size of a grain of rice, the microphone is made from a flexible piezoelectric material that directly measures the sound-induced motion of the eardrum. The tiny microphone’s sensitivity matches that of today’s best external hearing aids.

Cochlear implants create a novel pathway for sounds to reach the brain. An external microphone and processor, worn behind the ear or on the scalp, collect and translate incoming sounds into electrical signals, which get transmitted to an electrode that’s surgically implanted in the cochlea, deep within the inner ear. There, the electrical signals directly stimulate the auditory nerve, sending information to the brain to interpret as sound.

But, says Hideko Heidi Nakajima, an associate professor of otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Eye and Ear, “people don’t like the external hardware.” They can’t wear it while sleeping, or while swimming or doing many other forms of exercise, and so many potential candidates forgo the device altogether. What’s more, incoming sound goes directly into the microphone and bypasses the outer ear, which would otherwise perform the key functions of amplifying sound and filtering noise. “Now the big idea is instead to get everything—processor, battery, microphone—inside the ear,” says Nakajima. But even in clinical trials of fully internal designs, the microphone’s sensitivity—or lack thereof—has remained a roadblock.

Nakajima, along with colleagues from MIT, Harvard, and Columbia University, fabricated a cantilever microphone that senses the motion of a bone attached behind the eardrum called the umbo. Sound entering the ear canal causes the umbo to vibrate unidirectionally, with a displacement 10 times as great as other nearby bones. The tip of the “UmboMic” touches the umbo, and the umbo’s movements flex the material and produce an electrical charge through the piezoelectric effect. These electrical signals can then be processed and transmitted to the auditory nerve. “We’re using what nature gave us, which is the outer ear,” says Nakajima.

Why a cochlear implant needs low-noise, low-power electronics

Making a biocompatible microphone that can detect the eardrum’s minuscule movements isn’t easy, however. Jeff Lang, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT who jointly led the work, points out that only certain materials are tolerated by the human body. Another challenge is shielding the device from internal electronics to reduce noise. And then there’s long-term reliability. “We’d like an implant to last for decades,” says Lang.

In tests of the implantable microphone prototype, a laser beam measures the umbo’s motion, which gets transferred to the sensor tip. JEFF LANG & HEIDI NAKAJIMA

The researchers settled on a triangular design for the 3-by-3-millimeter sensor made from two layers of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), a biocompatible piezoelectric polymer, sandwiched between layers of flexible, electrode-patterned polymer. When the cantilever tip bends, one PVDF layer produces a positive charge and the other produces a negative charge—taking the difference between the two cancels much of the noise. The triangular shape provides the most uniform stress distribution within the bending cantilever, maximizing the displacement it can undergo before it breaks. “The sensor can detect sounds below a quiet whisper,” says Lang.

Emma Wawrzynek, a graduate student at MIT, says that working with PVDF is tricky because it loses its piezoelectric properties at high temperatures, and most fabrication techniques involve heating the sample. “That’s a challenge especially for encapsulation,” which involves encasing the device in a protective layer so it can remain safely in the body, she says. The group had success by gradually depositing titanium and gold onto the PVDF while using a heat sink to cool it. That approach created a shielding layer that protects the charge-sensing electrodes from electromagnetic interference.

The other tool for improving a microphone’s performance is, of course, amplifying the signal. “On the electronics side, a low-noise amp is not necessarily a huge challenge to build if you’re willing to spend extra power,” says Lang. But, according to MIT graduate student John Zhang, cochlear implant manufacturers try to limit power for the entire device to 5 milliwatts, and just 1 mW for the microphone. “The trade-off between noise and power is hard to hit,” Zhang says. He and fellow student Aaron Yeiser developed a custom low-noise, low-power charge amplifier that outperformed commercially available options.

“Our goal was to perform better than or at least equal the performance of high-end capacitative external microphones,” says Nakajima. For leading external hearing-aid microphones, that means sensitivity down to a sound pressure level of 30 decibels—the equivalent of a whisper. In tests of the UmboMic on human cadavers, the researchers implanted the microphone and amplifier near the umbo, input sound through the ear canal, and measured what got sensed. Their device reached 30 decibels over the frequency range from 100 hertz to 6 kilohertz, which is the standard for cochlear implants and hearing aids and covers the frequencies of human speech. “But adding the outer ear’s filtering effects means we’re doing better [than traditional hearing aids], down to 10 dB, especially in speech frequencies,” says Nakajima.

Plenty of testing lies ahead, at the bench and on sheep before an eventual human trial. But if their UmboMic passes muster, the team hopes that it will help more than 1 million people worldwide go about their lives with a new sense of sound.

The work was published on 27 June in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

Blood pressure is one of the critical vital signs for health, but standard practice can only capture a snapshot, using a pressure cuff to squeeze arteries. Continuous readings are available, but only by inserting a transducer directly into an artery via a needle and catheter. Thanks to researchers at Caltech, however, it may soon be possible to measure blood pressure continuously at just about any part of the body.

In a paper published in July in PNAS Nexus, the researchers describe their resonance sonomanometry (RSM) approach to reading blood pressure. This new technology uses ultrasound to measure the dimensions of artery walls. It also uses sound waves to find resonant frequencies that can reveal the pressure within those walls via arterial wall tension. This information is sufficient to calculate the absolute pressure within the artery at any moment, without the need for calibration.

This last factor is important, as other non-invasive approaches only provide relative changes in blood pressure. They require periodic calibration using readings from a traditional pressure cuff. The RSM technology eliminates the need for calibration, making continuous readings more reliable.

How resonance sonomanometry works

The researchers’ RSM system uses an ultrasound transducer to measure the dimensions of the artery. It also transmits sound waves at different frequencies. The vibrations cause the arterial walls to move in and out in response, creating a distinct pattern of motion. When the resonant frequency is transmitted, the top and bottom of the artery will move in and out in unison.

This resonant frequency can be used to determine the tension of the artery walls. The tension in the walls is directly correlated with the fluid pressure of the blood within the artery. As a result, the blood pressure can be calculated at any instant based on the dimensions of the artery and its resonant frequency.

The researchers have validated this approach with both mockups and human subjects. They first tested the technology on an arterial model that used a thin-walled rubber tubing and a syringe to vary the pressure. They tested this mockup using multiple pressures and tubing of different diameters.

The researchers then took measurements with human subjects at their carotid arteries (located in the neck), using a standard pressure cuff to take intermittent measurements. The RSM technology was successful, and subsequently was also demonstrated on axillary (shoulder), brachial (arm), and femoral (leg) arteries. The readings were so clear that the researchers mention that they might even be able to detect blood pressure changes related to respiration and its impact on thoracic pressure.

Unlike traditional pressure cuff approaches, RSM provides data during the entire heartbeat cycle, and not just the systolic and diastolic extremes (In other words, the two numbers you receive during a traditional blood pressure measurement). And the fact that RSM works with different-sized arteries means that it should be applicable across different body sizes and types. Using ultrasound also eliminates possible complications such as skin coloration that can affect light-based devices.

The researchers tested their ultrasound-based blood pressure approach on subjects’ carotid arteries.Esperto Medical

“I’m a big fan of continuous monitoring; a yearly blood pressure reading in the doctor’s office is insufficient for decision making,” says Nick van Terheyden, M.D., the digital health leader with Iodine Software, a company providing machine learning technologies to improve healthcare insights. “A new approach based on good old rules of math and physics is an exciting development.”

The Caltech researchers have created a spinoff company, Esperto Medical, to develop a commercial product using RSM technology. The company has created a transducer module that is smaller than a deck of cards, making it practical to incorporate into a wearable armband. They hope to miniaturize the hardware to the point that it could be incorporated into a wrist-worn device. According to Raymond Jimenez, Esperto Medical’s chief technology officer, “this technology poses the potential to unlock accurate, calibration-free [blood pressure measurements] everywhere—in the clinic, at the gym, and even at home.”

It appears that there’s a significant market for such a product. “92 percent of consumers who intend to buy a wearable device are willing to pay extra for a health-related feature, and blood pressure ranks first among such features,” says Elizabeth Parks, the president of Internet of Things consulting firm Parks Associates.

In the future, rather than relying on arm-squeezing blood pressure cuffs, smart watches may be able to directly monitor blood pressure throughout the day, just as they already do for heart rate and other vital signs.

If you’ve ever tried to get a bandage to stick to your elbow, you understand the difficulty in creating wearable devices that attach securely to the human body. Add digital electronic circuitry, and the problem becomes more complicated. Now include the need for the device to fix breaks and damage automatically—and let’s make it biodegradable while we’re at it—and many researchers would throw up their hands in surrender.

Fortunately, an international team led by researchers at Korea University Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology (KU-KIST) persevered, and has developed conductor materials that it claims are stretchable, self-healing, and biocompatible. Their project was described this month in the journal Science Advances.

The biodegradable conductor offers a new approach to patient monitoring and delivering treatments directly to the tissues and organs where they are needed. For example, a smart patch made of these materials could measure motion, temperature, and other biological data. The material could also be used to create sensor patches that can be implanted inside the body, and even mounted on the surface of internal organs. The biocompatible materials can be designed to degrade after a period of time, eliminating the need for an invasive procedure to remove the sensor later.

“This new technology is a glimpse at the future of remote healthcare,” says Robert Rose, CEO of Rose Strategic Partners, LLC. “Remote patient monitoring is an industry still in its early stages, but already we are seeing the promise of what is not only possible, but close on the horizon. Imagine a device implanted at a surgical site to monitor and report your internal healing progress. If it is damaged, the device can heal itself, and when the job is done, it simply dissolves. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s now science fact.”

Self-healing elastics

After being cut a ribbonlike film was able to heal itself in about 1 minute.Suk-Won Hwang

The system relies on two different layers of flexible material, both self-healing: one is for conduction and the other is an elastomer layer that serves as a substrate to support the sensors and circuitry needed to collect data. The conductor layer is based on a substance known by the acronym PEDOT:PSS, which is short for Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate. It’s a conductive polymer widely used in making flexible displays and touch panels, as well as wearable devices. To increase the polymer’s conductivity and self-healing properties, the research team used additives including polyethylene glycol and glycol, which helped increase conductivity as well as the material’s ability to automatically repair damage such as cuts or tears.

In order to conform to curved tissues and survive typical body motion, the substrate layer must be extremely flexible. The researchers based it on elastomers that can match the shape of curved tissues, such as skin or individual organs.

These two layers stick to each other, thanks to chemical bonds that can connect the polymer chains of the plastic films in each layer. Combined, these materials create a system that is flexible and stretchable. In testing, the researchers showed that the materials could survive stretching up to 500 percent.

The self-healing function arises from the material’s ability to reconnect to itself when cut or otherwise damaged. This self-healing feature is based on a chemical process called disulfide metathesis. In short, polymer molecules containing pairs of linked sulfur atoms, called disulfides, have the ability to reform themselves after being severed. The phenomenon arises from a chemical process called disulfide-disulfide shuffling reactions, in which disulfide bonds in the molecule break and then reform, not necessarily between the original partners. According to the KU-KIST researchers, after being cut, their material was able to recover conductivity in its circuits within about two minutes without any intervention. The material was also tested for bending, twisting, and its ability to function both in air and under water.

This approach offers many advantages over other flexible electronics designs. For example, silver nanowires and carbon nanotubes have been used as the basis for stretchable devices, but they can be brittle and lack the self-healing properties of the KU-KIST materials. Other materials such as liquid metals can self-heal, but they are typically difficult to handle and integrate into wearable circuitry.

As a demonstration, the team created a multifunction sensor that included humidity, temperature, and pressure sensors that was approximately 4.5 square centimeters. In spite of being cut in four separate locations, it was able to heal itself and continue to provide sensor readings.

Implant tested in a rat

To take the demonstration a step further, the researchers created a 1.8-cm² device that was attached to a rat’s bladder. The device was designed to wrap around the bladder and then adhere to itself, so no adhesives or sutures were required to attach the sensor onto the bladder. The team chose the bladder for their experiments because, under normal conditions, its size can change by 300 percent.

The device incorporated both electrodes and pressure sensors, which were able to detect changes in the bladder pressure. The electrodes could detect bladder voiding, through electromyography signals, as well as stimulate the bladder to induce urination. As with the initial demonstration, intentional damage to the device’s circuitry healed on its own, without intervention.

The biocompatible and biodegradable nature of the materials is important because it means that devices fabricated with them can be worn on the skin, as well as implanted within the body. The fact that the materials are biodegradable means that implants would not need a second surgical procedure to remove them. They could be left in place after serving their purpose, and they would be absorbed by the body.

According to Suk-Won Hwang, assistant professor at KU-KIST, a few hurdles remain on the path to commercialization. “We need to test the biocompatibility of some of the materials used in the conductor and substrate layers. While scalable production appears to be feasible, the high cost of disulfide derivatives might make the technology too expensive, aside from some special applications,” he says. “Biocompatibility testing and material synthesis optimization will take one to two years, at least.”

For the first time, scientists have created a flexible programmable chip that is not made of silicon. The new ultralow-power 32-bit microprocessor from U.K.-based Pragmatic Semiconductor and its colleagues can operate while bent, and can run machine learning workloads. The microchip’s open-source RISC-V architecture suggests it might cost less than a dollar, putting it in a position to power wearable healthcare electronics, smart package labels, and other inexpensive items, its inventors add.

For example, “we can develop an ECG patch that has flexible electrodes attached to the chest and a flexible microprocessor connected to flexible electrodes to classify arrhythmia conditions by processing the ECG data from a patient,” says Emre Ozer, senior director of processor development at Pragmatic, a flexible chip manufacturer in Cambridge, England. Detecting normal heart rhythms versus an arrhythmia “is a machine learning task that can run in software in the flexible microprocessor,” he says.

Flexible electronics have the potential for any application requiring interactions with soft materials, such as devices worn on or implanted within the body. Those applications could include on-skin computers, soft robotics, and brain-machine interfaces. But, conventional electronics are made of rigid materials such as silicon.

Open-source, Flexible, and Fast Enough

Pragmatic sought to create a flexible microchip that cost significantly less to make than a silicon processor. The new device, named Flex-RV, is a 32-bit microprocessor based on the metal-oxide semiconductor indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO).

Attempts to create flexible devices from silicon require special packaging for the brittle microchips to protect them from the mechanical stresses of bending and stretching. In contrast, pliable thin-film transistors made from IGZO can be made directly at low temperatures onto flexible plastics, leading to lower costs.

The new microchip is based on the RISC-V instruction set. (RISC stands for reduced instruction set computer.) First introduced in 2010, RISC-V aims to enable smaller, lower-power, better-performing processors by slimming down the core set of instructions they can execute.

“Our end goal is to democratize computing by developing a license-free microprocessor,” Ozer says.

RISC-V’s is both free and open-source, letting chip designer dodge the costly licensing fees associated with proprietary architectures such as x86 and Arm. In addition, proprietary architectures offer limited opportunities to customize them, as adding new instructions is generally restricted. In contrast, RISC-V encourages such changes.

A bent Flex-RV microprocessor runs a program to print ‘Hello World’. Pragmatic Semiconductor

“We chose the Serv designed by Olof Kindgren... as the open source 32-bit RISC-V CPU when we designed Flex-RV,” Ozer says. “Serv is the smallest RISC-V processor in the open-source community.”

Other processors have been built using flexible semiconductors, such as Pragmatic’s 32-bit PlasticARM and an ultracheap microcontroller designed by engineers in Illinois. Unlike these earlier devices, Flex-RV is programmable and can run compiled programs written in high-level languages such as C. In addition, the open-source nature of RISC-V also let the researchers equip Flex-RV with a programmable machine learning hardware accelerator, enabling artificial intelligence applications.

Each Flex-RV microprocessor has a 17.5 square millimeter core and roughly 12,600 logic gates. The research team found Flex-RV could run as fast as 60 kilohertz while consuming less than 6 milliwatts of power.

All previous flexible non-silicon microprocessors were tested solely on the wafers they were made on. In contrast, Flex-RV was tested on flexible printed circuit boards, which let the researchers see how well it operated when flexed. The Pragmatic team found that Flex-RV could still execute programs correctly when bent to a curve with a radius of 3 millimeters. Performance varied between a 4.3 percent slowdown to a 2.3 percent speedup depending on the way it was bent. “Further research is needed to understand how bending conditions such as direction, orientation and angle impact performance at macro and micro scales,” Ozer says.

Silicon microchips can run at gigahertz speeds, much faster than Flex-RV, but that shouldn’t be a problem, according to Ozer. “Many sensors—for example, temperature, pressure, odor, humidity, pH, and so on—in the flexible electronics world typically operate very slowly at hertz or kilohertz regimes,” he says. “These sensors are used in smart packaging, labels and wearable healthcare electronics, which are the emerging applications for which flexible microprocessors will be useful. Running the microprocessor at 60 kHz would be more than enough to meet the requirements of these applications.”

Ozer and his team suggest each Flex-RV might cost less than a dollar. Although Ozer did not want to say how much less than a dollar it might cost, he says they are confident such low costs are possible “thanks to low-cost flexible chip fabrication technology by Pragmatic and a license-free RISC-V technology.”

The scientists detailed their findings online 25 September in the journal Nature.

Neuralink’s visual prosthesis Blindsight has been designated a breakthrough device by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which potentially sets the technology on a fast track to approval.

In confirming the news, an FDA spokesperson emphasized that the designation does not mean that Blindsight is yet considered safe or effective. Technologies in the program have potential to improve the current standard of care and are novel compared to what’s available on the market, but the devices still have to go through full clinical trials before seeking FDA approval.

Still, the announcement is a sign that Neuralink is moving closer to testing Blindsight in human patients. The company is recruiting people with vision loss for studies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Visual prostheses work by capturing visual information with a video camera, typically attached to glasses or a headset. Then a processor converts the data to an electrical signal that can be relayed to the nervous system. Retinal implants have been a common approach, with electrodes feeding the signal to nerves in the retina, at the back of the eye, from where it travels on to the brain. But Blindsight uses a brain implant to send the signal directly to neurons in the visual cortex.

In recent years, other companies developing artificial vision prosthetics have reached clinical research trials or beyond, only to struggle financially, leaving patients without support. Some of these technologies live on with new backing: Second Sight’s Orion cortical implant project is now in a clinical trial with Cortigent, and Pixium Vision’s Prima system is now owned by Science, with ex-Neuralink founder Max Hodak at the helm. No company has yet commercialized a visual prosthetic that uses a brain implant.

Elon Musk’s Claims About Blindsight

Very little information about Blindsight is publicly available. As of this writing, there is no official Blindsight page on the Neuralink website, and Neuralink did not respond to requests for comment. It’s also unclear how exactly Blindsight relates to a brain-computer interface that Neuralink has already implanted in two people with paralysis, who use their devices to control computer cursors.

Experts who spoke with IEEE Spectrum felt that, if judged against the strong claims made by Neuralink’s billionaire co-founder Elon Musk, Blindsight will almost certainly disappoint. However, some were still open to the possibility that Neuralink could successfully bring a device to market that can help people with vision loss, albeit with less dramatic effects on their sense of sight. While Musk’s personal fortune could help Blindsight weather difficulties that would end other projects, experts did not feel it was a guarantee of success.

After Neuralink announced on X (formerly Twitter) that Blindsight had received the breakthrough device designation, Musk wrote:

The Blindsight device from Neuralink will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see.

Provided the visual cortex is intact, it will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time.

To set expectations correctly, the vision will be at first be [sic] low resolution, like Atari graphics, but eventually it has the potential be [sic] better than natural vision and enable you to see in infrared, ultraviolet or even radar wavelengths, like Geordi La Forge.

Musk included a picture of La Forge, a character from the science-fiction franchise Star Trek who wears a vision-enhancing visor.

Experts Puncture the Blindsight Hype

“[Musk] will build the best cortical implant we can build with current technology. It will not produce anything like normal vision. [Yet] it might produce vision that can transform the lives of blind people,” said Ione Fine, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Washington, who has written about the potential limitations of cortical implants, given the complexity of the human visual system. Fine previously worked for the company Second Sight.

A successful visual prosthetic might more realistically be thought of as assistive technology than a cure for blindness. “At best, we’re talking about something that’s augmentative to a cane and a guide dog; not something that replaces a cane and a guide dog,” said Philip Troyk, a biomedical engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Restoring natural vision is beyond the reach of today’s technology. But among Musks recent claims, Troyk says that a form of infrared sensing is plausible and has already been tested with one of his patients, who used it for help locating people within a room. That patient has a 400-electrode device implanted in the visual cortex as part of a collaborative research effort called the Intracortical Visual Prosthesis Project (ICVP). By comparison, Blindsight may have more than 1,000 electrodes, if it’s a similar device to Neuralink’s brain-computer interface.

Experts say they’d like more information about Neuralink’s visual prosthetic. “I’m leery about the fact that they are very superficial in their description of the devices,” said Gislin Dagnelie, a vision scientist at Johns Hopkins University who has been involved in multiple clinical trials for vision prosthetics, including a Second Sight retinal implant, and who is currently collaborating on the ICVP. “There’s no clear evaluation or pre-clinical work that has been published,” says Dagnelie. “It’s all based on: ‘Trust us, we’re Neuralink.’”

In the short term, too much hype could mislead clinical trial participants. It could also degrade interest in small but meaningful advancements in visual prosthetics. “Some of the [Neuralink] technology is exciting, and has potential,” said Troyk. “The way the messaging is being done detracts from that, potentially.”

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

Any imaging technique that allows scientists to observe the inner workings of a living organism, in real-time, provides a wealth of information compared to experiments in a test tube. While there are many such imaging approaches in existence, they require test subjects—in this case rodents—to be tethered to the monitoring device. This limits the ability of animals under study to roam freely during experiments.

Researchers have recently designed a new microscope with a unique feature: It’s capable of transmitting real-time imaging from inside live mice via Bluetooth to a nearby phone or laptop. Once the device has been further miniaturized, the wireless connection will allow mice and other test subject animals to roam freely, making it easier to observe them in a more natural state.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Bluetooth wireless microscope,” says Arvind Pathak, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Through a series of experiments, Pathak and his colleagues demonstrate how the novel wireless microscope, called BLEscope, offers continuous monitoring of blood vessels and tumors in the brains of mice. The results are described in a study published 24 September in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

Microscopes have helped shed light on many biological mysteries, but the devices typically require that cells be removed from an organism and studied in a test tube. Any opportunity to study the biological process as it naturally occurs in the in the body (“in vivo”) tends to offer more useful and thorough information.

Several different miniature microscopes designed for in vivo experiments in animals exist. However, Pathak notes that these often require high power consumption or a wire to be tethered to the device to transmit the data—or both—which may restrict an animal’s natural movements and behavior.

“To overcome these hurdles, [Johns Hopkins University Ph.D. candidate] Subhrajit Das and our team designed an imaging system that operates with ultra-low power consumption—below 50 milliwatts—while enabling wireless data transmission and continuous, functional imaging at spatial resolutions of 5 to 10 micrometers in [rodents],” says Pathak.

The researchers created BLEscope using an off-the-shelf, low-power image sensor and microcontroller, which are integrated on a printed circuit board. Importantly, it has two LED lights of different colors—green and blue—that help create contrast during imaging.

“The BLE protocol enabled wireless control of the BLEscope, which then captures and transmits images wirelessly to a laptop or phone,” Pathak explains. “Its low power consumption and portability make it ideal for remote, real-time imaging.”

Pathak and his colleagues tested BLEscope in live mice through two experiments. In the first scenario, they added a fluorescent marker into the blood of mice and used BLEscope to characterize blood flow within the animals’ brains in real-time. In the second experiment, the researchers altered the oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios of the air being breathed in by mice with brain tumors, and were able to observe blood vessel changes in the fluorescently marked tumors.

“The BLEscope’s key strength is its ability to wirelessly conduct high-resolution, multi-contrast imaging for up to 1.5 hours, without the need for a tethered power supply,” Pathak says.

However, Pathak points out that the current prototype is limited by its size and weight. BLEscope will need to be further miniaturized, so that it doesn’t interfere with animals’ abilities to roam freely during experiments.

“We’re planning to miniaturize the necessary electronic components onto a flexible light-weight printed circuit board, which would reduce weight and footprint of the BLEscope to make it suitable for use on freely moving animals,” says Pathak.

This story was updated on 14 October 2024, to correct a statement about the size of the BLEscope.

Emteq Labs wants eyewear to be the next frontier of wearable health technology.

The Brighton, England-based company introduced today its emotion-sensing eyewear, Sense. The glasses contain nine optical sensors distributed across the rims that detect subtle changes in facial expression with more than 93 percent accuracy when paired with Emteq’s current software. “If your face moves, we can capture it,” says Steen Strand, whose appointment as Emteq’s new CEO was also announced today. With that detailed data, “you can really start to decode all kinds of things.” The continuous data could help people uncover patterns in their behavior and mood, similar to an activity or sleep tracker.

Emteq is now aiming to take its tech out of laboratory settings with real-world applications. The company is currently producing a small number of Sense glasses, and they’ll be available to commercial partners in December.

The announcement comes just weeks after Meta and Snap each unveiled augmented reality glasses that remain in development. These glasses are “far from ready,” says Strand, who led the augmented reality eyewear division while working at Snap from 2018 to 2022. “In the meantime, we can serve up lightweight eyewear that we believe can deliver some really cool health benefits.”

Fly Vision Vectors

While current augmented reality (AR) headsets have large battery packs to power the devices, glasses require a lightweight design. “Every little bit of power, every bit of weight, becomes critically important,” says Strand. The current version of Sense weighs 62 grams, slightly heavier than the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which weigh in at about 50 grams.

Because of the weight constraints, Emteq couldn’t use the power-hungry cameras typically used in headsets. With cameras, motion is detected by looking at how pixels change between consecutive images. The method is effective, but captures a lot of redundant information and uses more power. The eyewear’s engineers instead opted for optical sensors that efficiently capture vectors when points on the face move due to the underlying muscles. These sensors were inspired by the efficiency of fly vision. “Flies are incredibly efficient at measuring motion,” says Emteq founder and CSO Charles Nduka. “That’s why you can’t swat the bloody things. They have a very high sample rate internally.”

Sense glasses can capture data as often as 6,000 times per second. The vector-based approach also adds a third dimension to a typical camera’s 2D view of pixels in a single plane.

These sensors look for activation of facial muscles, and the area around the eyes is an ideal spot. While it’s easy to suppress or force a smile, the upper half of our face tends to have more involuntary responses, explains Nduka, who also works as a plastic surgeon in the United Kingdom. However, the glasses can also collect information about the mouth by monitoring the cheek muscles that control jaw movements, conveniently located near the lower rim of a pair of glasses. The data collected is then transmitted from the glasses to pass through Emteq’s algorithms in order to translate the vector data into usable information.

In addition to interpreting facial expressions, Sense can be used to track food intake, an application discovered by accident when one of Emteq’s developers was wearing the glasses while eating breakfast. By monitoring jaw movement, the glasses detect when a user chews and how quickly they eat. Meanwhile, a downward-facing camera takes a photo to log the food, and uses a large language model to determine what’s in the photo, effectively making food logging a passive activity. Currently, Emteq is using an instance of OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model to accomplish this, but the company has plans to create their own algorithm in the future. Other applications, including monitoring physical activity and posture, are also in development.

One Platform, Many Uses

Nduka believes Emteq’s glasses represent a “fundamental technology,” similar to how the accelerometer is used for a host of applications in smartphones, including managing screen orientation, tracking activity, and even revealing infrastructure damage.

Similarly, Emteq has chosen to develop the technology as a general facial data platform for a range of uses. “If we went deep on just one, it means that all the other opportunities that can be helped—especially some of those rarer use cases—they’d all be delayed,” says Nduka. For example, Nduka is passionate about developing a tool to help those with facial paralysis. But a specialized device for those patients would have high unit costs and be unaffordable for the target user. Allowing more companies to use Emteq’s intellectual property and algorithms will bring down cost.

In this buckshot approach, the general target for Sense’s potential use cases is health applications. “If you look at the history of wearables, health has been the primary driver,” says Strand. The same may be true for eyewear, and he says there’s potential for diet and emotional data to be “the next pillar of health” after sleep and physical activity.

How the data is delivered is still to be determined. In some applications, it could be used to provide real-time feedback—for instance, vibrating to remind the user to slow down eating. Or, it could be used by health professionals only to collect a week’s worth of at-home data for patients with mental health conditions, which Nduka notes largely lack objective measures. (As a medical device for treatment of diagnosed conditions, Sense would have to go through a more intensive regulatory process.) While some users are hungry for more data, others may require a “much more gentle, qualitative approach,” says Strand. Emteq plans to work with expert providers to appropriately package information for users.

Interpreting the data must be done with care, says Vivian Genaro Motti, an associate professor at George Mason University who leads the Human-Centric Design Lab. What expressions mean may vary based on cultural and demographic factors, and “we need to take into account that people sometimes respond to emotions in different ways,” Motti says. With little regulation of wearable devices, she says it’s also important to ensure privacy and protect user data. But Motti raises these concerns because there is a promising potential for the device. “If this is widespread, it’s important that we think carefully about the implications.”

Privacy is also a concern to Edward Savonov, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Alabama, who developed a similar device for dietary tracking in his lab. Having a camera mounted on Emteq’s glasses could pose issues, both for the privacy of those around a user and a user’s own personal information. Many people eat in front of their computer or cell phone, so sensitive data may be in view.

For technology like Sense to be adopted, Sazonov says questions about usability and privacy concerns must first be answered. “Eyewear-based technology has potential for a great future—if we get it right.”

Over the past 20 years, technological advances have enabled inventors to go from strength to strength. And yet, according to the legendary inventor Dean Kamen, innovation has stalled. Kamen made a name for himself with inventions including the first portable insulin pump for diabetics, an advanced wheelchair that can climb steps, and the Segway mobility device. Here, he talks about his plan for enabling innovators.

How has inventing changed since you started in the 1990s?

Dean Kamen: Kids all over the world can now be inventing in the world of synthetic biology the way we played with Tinkertoys and Erector Sets and Lego. I used to put pins and smelly formaldehyde in frogs in high school. Today in high school, kids will do experiments that would have won you the Nobel Prize in Medicine 40 years ago. But none of those kids are likely in any short time to be on the market with a pharmaceutical that will have global impact. Today, while invention is getting easier and easier, I think there are some aspects of innovation that have gotten much more difficult.

Can you explain the difference?

Kamen: Most people think those two words mean the same thing. Invention is coming up with an idea or a thing or a process that has never been done that way before. [Thanks to] more access to technology and 3D printers and simulation programs and virtual ways to make things, the threshold to be able to create something new and different has dramatically lowered.

Historically, inventions were only the starting point to get to innovation. And I’ll define an innovation as something that reached a scale where it impacted a piece of the world, or transformed it: the wheel, steam, electricity, Internet. Getting an invention to the scale it needs to be to become an innovation has gotten easier—if it’s software. But if it’s sophisticated technology that requires mechanical or physical structure in a very competitive world? It’s getting harder and harder to do due to competition, due to global regulatory environments.

[For example,] in proteomics [the study of proteins] and genomics and biomedical engineering, the invention part is, believe it or not, getting a little easier because we know so much, because there are development platforms now to do it. But getting a biotech product cleared by the Food and Drug Administration is getting more expensive and time consuming, and the risks involved are making the investment community much more likely to invest in the next version of Angry Birds than curing cancer.

A lot of ink has been spilled about how AI is changing inventing. Why hasn’t that helped?

Kamen: AI is an incredibly valuable tool. As long as the value you’re looking for is to be able to collect massive amounts of data and being able to process that data effectively. That’s very different than what a lot of people believe, which is that AI is inventing and creating from whole cloth new and different ideas.

How are you using AI to help with innovation?

Kamen: Every medical school has incredibly brilliant professors and grad students with petri dishes. “Look, I can make nephrons. We can grow people a new kidney. They won’t need dialysis.” But they only have petri dishes full of the stuff. And the scale they need is hundreds and hundreds of liters.

I started a not-for-profit called ARMI—the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute—to help make it practical to manufacture human cells, tissues, and organs. We are using artificial intelligence to speed up our development processes and eliminate going down frustratingly long and expensive [dead-end] paths. We figure out how to bring tissue manufacturing to scale. We build the bioreactors, sensor technologies, robotics, and controls. We’re going to put them together and create an industry that can manufacture hundreds of thousands of replacement kidneys, livers, pancreases, lungs, blood, bone, you name it.

So ARMI’s purpose is to help would-be innovators?

Kamen: We are not going to make a product. We’re not even going to make a whole company. We’re going to create baseline core technologies that will enable all sorts of products and companies to emerge to create an entire new industry. It will be an innovation in health care that will lower costs because cures are much cheaper than chronic treatments. We have to break down the barriers so that these fantastic inventions can become global innovations.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Inventor’s Inventor.”

Imagine you’re a baby cocoa plant, just unfurling your first tentative roots into the fertile, welcoming soil.

Somewhere nearby, a predator stirs. It has no ears to hear you, no eyes to see you. But it knows where you are, thanks in part to the weak electric field emitted by your roots.

It is microscopic, but it’s not alone. By the thousands, the creatures converge, slithering through the waterlogged soil, propelled by their flagella. If they reach you, they will use fungal-like hyphae to penetrate and devour you from the inside. They’re getting closer. You’re a plant. You have no legs. There’s no escape.

But just before they fall upon you, they hesitate. They seem confused. Then, en masse, they swarm off in a different direction, lured by a more attractive electric field. You are safe. And they will soon be dead.

If Eleonora Moratto and Giovanni Sena get their way, this is the future of crop pathogen control.

Many variables are involved in the global food crisis, but among the worst are the pests that devastate food crops, ruining up to 40 percent of their yield before they can be harvested. One of these—the little protist in the example above, an oomycete formally known as Phytophthora palmivora—has a US $1 billion appetite for economic staples like cocoa, palm, and rubber.

There is currently no chemical defense that can vanquish these creatures without poisoning the rest of the (often beneficial) organisms living in the soil. So Moratto, Sena, and their colleagues at Sena’s group at Imperial College London settled on a non-traditional approach: They exploited P. palmivora’s electric sense, which can be spoofed.

All plant roots that have been measured to date generate external ion flux, which translates into a very weak electric field. Decades of evidence suggests that this signal is an important target for predators’ navigation systems. However, it remains a matter of some debate how much their predators rely on plants’ electrical signatures to locate them, as opposed to chemical or mechanical information. Last year, Moratto and Sena’s group found that P. palmivora spores are attracted to the positive electrode of a cell generating current densities of 1 ampere per square meter. “The spores followed the electric field,” says Sena, suggesting that a similar mechanism helps them find natural bioelectric fields emitted by roots in the soil.

That got the researchers wondering: Might such an artificial electric field override the protists’ other sensory inputs, and scramble their compasses as they tried to use plant roots’ much weaker electrical output?

To test the idea, the researchers developed two ways to protect plant roots using a constant vertical electric field. They cultivated two common snacks for P. palmivora—a flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, and a legume often used as a livestock feed plant—in tubes in a hydroponic solution.

Two electric-field configurations were tested: A “global” vertical field [left] and a field generated by two small nearby electrodes. The global field proved to be slightly more effective.Eleonora Moratto

In the first assay, the researchers sandwiched the plant roots between rows of electrodes above and below, which completely engulfed them in a “global” vertical field. For the second set, the field was generated using two small electrodes a short distance away from the plant, creating current densities on the order of 10 A/m². Then they unleashed the protists.

With respect to the control group, both methods successfully diverted a significant portion of the predators away from the plant roots. They swarmed the positive electrode, where—since zoospores can’t survive for longer than about 2 to 3 hours without a host—they presumably starved to death. Or worse. Neil Gow, whose research presented some of the first evidence for zoospore electrosensing, has other theories about their fate. “Applied electrical fields generate toxic products and steep pH gradients near and around the electrodes due to the electrolysis of water,” he says. “The tropism towards the electrode might be followed by killing or immobilization due to the induced pH gradients.”

Not only did the technique prevent infestation, but some evidence indicates that it may also mitigate existing infections. The researchers published their results in August in Scientific Reports.

The global electric field was marginally more successful than the local. However, it would be harder to translate from lab conditions into a (literal) field trial in soil. The local electric field setup would be easy to replicate: “All you have to do is stick the little plug into the soil next to the crop you want to protect,” says Sena.

Moratto and Sena say this is a proof of concept that demonstrates a basis for a new, pesticide-free way to protect food crops. (Sena likens the technique to the decoys used by fighter jets to draw away incoming missiles by mimicking the signals of the original target.) They are now looking for funding to expand the project. The first step is testing the local setup in soil; the next is to test the approach on Phytophthora infestans, a meaner, scarier cousin of P. palmivora.

P. infestans attacks a more varied diet of crops—you may be familiar with its work during the Irish potato famine. The close genetic similarities imply another promising candidate for electrical pest control. This investigation, however, may require more funding. P. infestans research can be undertaken only under more stringent laboratory security protocols.

The work at Imperial ties into the broader—and somewhat charged—debate around electrostatic ecology; that is, the extent to which creatures including ticks make use of heretofore poorly understood electrical mechanisms to orient themselves and in other ways enhance their survival. “Most people still aren’t aware that naturally occurring electricity can play an ecological role,” says Sam England, a behavioral ecologist with Berlin’s Natural History Museum. “So I suspect that once these electrical phenomena become more well known and understood, they will inspire a greater number of practical applications like this one.”

In the spirit of the Halloween season, IEEE Spectrum presents a pair of stories that—although grounded in scientific truth rather than the macabre—were no less harrowing for those who lived them. In today’s installment, Robert Langer had to push back against his field’s conventional wisdom to pioneer a drug-delivery mechanism vital to modern medicine.

Nicknamed the Edison of Medicine, Robert Langer is one of the world’s most-cited researchers, with over 1,600 published papers, 1,400 patents, and a top-dog role as one of MIT’s nine prestigious Institute Professors. Langer pioneered the now-ubiquitous drug delivery systems used in modern cancer treatments and vaccines, indirectly saving countless lives throughout his 50-year career.

But, much like Edison and other inventors, Langer’s big ideas were initially met with skepticism from the scientific establishment.

He came up in the 1970s as a chemical engineering postdoc working in the lab of Dr. Judah Folkman, a pediatric surgeon at the Boston Children’s Hospital. Langer was tasked with solving what many believed was an impossible problem—isolating angiogenesis inhibitors to halt cancer growth. Folkman’s vision of stopping tumors from forming their own self-sustaining blood vessels was compelling enough, but few believed it possible.

Langer encountered both practical and social challenges before his first breakthrough. One day, a lab technician accidentally spilled six months’ worth of samples onto the floor, forcing him to repeat the painstaking process of dialyzing extracts. Those months of additional work steered Langer’s development of novel microspheres that could deliver large molecules of medicine directly to tumors.

In the 1970s, Langer developed these tiny microspheres to release large molecules through solid materials, a groundbreaking proof-of-concept for drug delivery.Robert Langer

Langer then submitted the discovery to prestigious journals and was invited to speak at a conference in Michigan in 1976. He practiced the 20-minute presentation for weeks, hoping for positive feedback from respected materials scientists. But when he stepped off the podium, a group approached him and said bluntly, “We don’t believe anything you just said.” They insisted that macromolecules were simply too large to pass through solid materials, and his choice of organic solvents would destroy many inputs. Conventional wisdom said so.

Nature published Langer’s paper three months later, demonstrating for the first time that non-inflammatory polymers could enable the sustained release of proteins and other macromolecules. The same year, Science published his isolation mechanism to restrict tumor growth.

Langer and Folkman’s research paved the way for modern drug delivery.MIT and Boston Children’s Hospital

Even with impressive publications, Langer still struggled to secure funding for his work in controlling macromolecule delivery, isolating the first angiogenesis inhibitors, and testing their behavior. His first two grant proposals were rejected on the same day, a devastating blow for a young academic. The reviewers doubted his experience as “just an engineer” who knew nothing about cancer or biology. One colleague tried to cheer him up, saying, “It’s probably good those grants were rejected early in your career. Since you’re not supporting any graduate students, you don’t have to let anyone go.” Langer thought the colleague was probably right, but the rejections still stung.

His patent applications, filed alongside Folkman at the Boston Children’s Hospital, were rejected five years in a row. After all, it’s difficult to prove you’ve got something good if you’re the only one doing it. Langer remembers feeling disappointed but not crushed entirely. Eventually, other scientists cited his findings and expanded upon them, giving Langer and Folkman the validation needed for intellectual property development. As of this writing, the pair’s two studies from 1976 have been cited nearly 2,000 times.

As the head of MIT’s Langer Lab, he often shares these same stories of rejection with early-career students and researchers. He leads a team of over 100 undergrads, grad students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scientists, all finding new ways to deliver genetically engineered proteins, DNA, and RNA, among other research areas. Langer’s reputation is further bolstered by the many successful companies he co-founded or advised, like mRNA leader Moderna, which rose to prominence after developing its widely used COVID-19 vaccine.

Langer sometimes thinks back to those early days—the shattered samples, the cold rejections, and the criticism from senior scientists. He maintains that “Conventional wisdom isn’t always correct, and it’s important to never give up—(almost) regardless of what others say.”

As a leader who has committed much of his career to improving healthcare — an industry that holds millions of people’s lives in its hands — I took from this terrifying incident a new guiding principle. Healthcare needs to pursue a zero-failure rate.

The post What My Daughter’s Harrowing Alaska Airlines Flight Taught Me About Healthcare appeared first on MedCity News.

When it comes to the effects that the upcoming Trump presidency will have on healthcare, attendees’ attitudes ranged from cautiously optimistic to fairly anxious. Some of the issues they highlighted included mental health parity, telehealth prescribing flexibilities, and the role of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The post How Did Attendees at a Behavioral Health Conference React to Trump’s Victory? appeared first on MedCity News.

Three ways health plans can engage, connect with, and delight their pregnant members to nurture goodwill, earn long-term trust, and foster loyal relationships that last.

The post Pregnant and Empowered: Why Trust is the Latest Form of Member Engagement appeared first on MedCity News.

Navigating the regulatory and ethical requirements of different medical data providers across many different countries, as well as safeguarding patient privacy, is a mammoth task that requires extra resources and expertise.  

The post AI is Revolutionizing Healthcare, But Are We Ready for the Ethical Challenges?  appeared first on MedCity News.

CDMO Avid Bioservices is being acquired by the private equity firms GHO Capital Partners and Ampersand Capital Partners. Avid specializes in manufacturing biologic products for companies at all stages of development.

The post Private Equity Is Picking Up Biologics CDMO Avid Bioservices in $1.1B Acquisition appeared first on MedCity News.

Value-based care contracting is especially difficult for behavioral health providers, Taft Parsons III, chief psychiatric officer at CVS Health/Aetna, pointed out during a conference this week.

The post CVS Health Exec: Payers Need to Stop Making Behavioral Health Providers Jump Through Hoops In Order to Participate in Value-Based Care appeared first on MedCity News.

During a panel discussion at the Behavioral Health Tech conference, experts shared the promise psychedelic medicines hold for mental health and why employers may want to consider offering them as a workplace benefit.

The post 4 Things Employers Should Know About Psychedelic Medicines appeared first on MedCity News.

The vast majority of older adults want to age at home. To support that goal, doctors should encourage them to consider their care options — long before they need assistance.

The post Through Early Discussions About Elder Care, Doctors Can Empower Seniors to Age in Place appeared first on MedCity News.

While startups in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance are almost certain to face heightened scrutiny, there are controllable factors that can offset these challenges.

The post The Startup Economy is Turbulent. Here’s How Founders Can Recognize and Avoid Common Pitfalls appeared first on MedCity News.

Building trust while simultaneously building products, selling, recruiting, and fundraising can feel impossible. But it’s required whether you have the time or not, and it doesn’t stop no matter how big you grow.

The post The Trust-Building Playbook: 5 Tips Every Digital Health Marketer Needs to Know appeared first on MedCity News.

Autolus Therapeutics’ Aucatzyl is now FDA approved for treating advanced cases of B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia. While it goes after the same target as Gilead Sciences’ Tecartus, Autolus engineered its CAR T-therapy with properties that could improve safety, efficacy, and durability.

The post ‘Serial Killing’ Cell Therapy From Autolus Lands FDA Approval in Blood Cancer appeared first on MedCity News.

By adopting a contingent workforce model and investing in the right data tools to power better informed decision-making and talent strategy, healthcare organizations can begin to address staffing challenges and turn their talent goals into reality. 

The post Closing Staffing Gaps in Healthcare by Utilizing Diverse Pipelines of Contingent Talent appeared first on MedCity News.

AbbVie schizophrenia drug candidate emraclidine failed to beat a placebo in two Phase 2 clinical trials. The drug, once projected to compete with Bristol Myers Squibb’s Cobenfy, is from AbbVie’s $8.7 billion acquisition of Cerevel Therapeutics.

The post AbbVie Drug Expected to Rival Bristol Myers’s New Schizophrenia Med Flunks Phase 2 Test appeared first on MedCity News.

Neurogene’s Rett syndrome gene therapy has preliminary data supporting safety and efficacy of the one-time treatment. But a late-breaking report of a serious complication in a patient who received the high dose sent shares of the biotech downward.

The post Neurogene Gene Therapy Shows Signs of Efficacy in Small Study, But an Adverse Event Spooks Investors appeared first on MedCity News.

The Pew Charitable Trusts joined dozens of research, health care, and nonprofit stakeholders in urging President-elect Joe Biden to prioritize and strengthen the national response to antibiotic resistance.

As winter arrives and daylight hours decrease, it gets easier to hit the snooze button and stay in bed. It turns out that there’s a scientific reason behind this phenomenon that helps to explain why people struggle to adjust their internal clocks—also known as circadian rhythm or sleep-wake cycle—when the weather turns colder.

Few correctional facilities in the United States have treatment programs for individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD), despite clear evidence that certain medications reduce the risk of overdose and death. Even in facilities where treatment is available, the COVID-19 pandemic has complicated efforts to provide such care.

The Pew Charitable Trusts sent comments Jan. 4 to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) urging them to support the easy exchange of individuals’ health records through a pair of regulations.

Breaking COVID-19’s chain of transmission requires effective physical distancing, contact tracing and rapid analyses of demographic data to reveal illness clusters and populations at high risk, such as people older than 65, Latinos and Blacks.

Research has consistently demonstrated strong links between people’s health and societal sectors such as employment, community development, education, housing, and transportation.

In vitro diagnostics (IVDs) play an indispensable role in modern medicine. Health care providers routinely rely on these tests—which analyze samples such as blood or saliva—to help diagnose conditions and guide potentially life-altering treatment decisions. In 2017, for example, clinicians ordered blood tests during about 45% of emergency room visits in the United States, according to the Centers...

Dr. Cassandra Quave’s path to her work as a leader in antibiotic drug discovery research initiatives at Emory University in Atlanta started when she was a child and she and her family dealt with her own serious health issues that have had life-long repercussions.

Over the past year, COVID-19 has taken a grave toll in lives as well as on medical and health care systems worldwide. The pandemic has laid bare the importance of public health readiness and the myriad consequences when such a crisis strikes an unprepared population.

The Pew Charitable Trusts today commended Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D), state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey (R), and Lee Chatfield (R)—whose term as state House Speaker ended last month—for passing and signing a bipartisan package of bills aimed at protecting public safety while reducing the number of people in county jails.

Sales of medically important antibiotics for use in food-producing animals increased 3% in 2019, according to recent data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This is the second year in a row that the quantities of antibiotics sold for animal use have risen, underscoring the need for further FDA action to ensure judicious use of these lifesaving drugs.

Chicken products cause an estimated 1 in 7 of the nation’s human Salmonella illnesses each year, partly because the pathogen can easily contaminate the environments where birds are raised. To reduce the risk that contaminated meat will reach consumers, poultry companies need measures that control the bacterium on farms where chickens are bred and raised.

The Food and Drug Administration published a concept paper in early January that describes a preliminary proposal for how the agency will ensure that companies developing antibiotics for administration to animals establish defined, evidence-based durations of use for all medically important antibiotics.

Modern innovation typically occurs one step-improvement at a time. Some clients initially question whether their new application of an existing technology is patentable. Usually, the answer is ‘yes.’ Under U.S. law (and most other jurisdictions), an innovation to an existing technology is patentable so long as at least one claim limitation is novel and non-obvious....… Continue Reading

Pharmaceutical and biotech companies breathed a sigh of relief Monday when the Federal Circuit unanimously ruled in a precedential opinion that the mere sale of manufacturing services to create embodiments of a patented product is not a “commercial sale” of the invention that triggers the on-sale bar of 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) (pre-AIA).[1]  The en banc opinion...… Continue Reading

A large amount of wind, much discussion about the U.S healthcare, and the public getting soaked again – if you were thinking about Washington, DC and the new Congress, you’re 3,000 miles away from the action. This is the week of the annual JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco, with many thousands of healthcare...… Continue Reading

Social media has become a significant source of health-related content. But while it connects people to news, updates, […]

GLP-1 receptor agonists, used to treat Type 2 diabetes and now widely prescribed for weight loss, have seen […]

We’re seeing an alarming increase in the number of failed biotech companies. While the biotechnology industry holds enormous […]

Learn how to take simple x/y coordinates, and create map polygons shaped like holiday images, that can be plotted using SAS/Graph's PROC GMAP.