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Pacemakers and other medical implants run on electricity. You can’t plug them in, so earlier versions required batteries, which needed to be surgically replaced every so often and could leak toxic chemicals into the patient’s body.
In recent years, scientists have dabbled in ways to borrow the body’s own energy to run the devices.
Scientists at the University of Illinois found a way to turn heartbeats into an electric current that powers a pacemaker.
A team of researchers from Stanford University and the University of Connecticut created an implantable supercapacitor, which gathers electric charge from electrolytes in the blood, and paired it with an implantable “energy harvester” that converts body heat and energy from motion into an electric current.
Now there’s an “energy wafer” from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Germany’s Technical University in Munich.
The wafer is 100 times thinner than a human hair and is studded with 150 fuel cells. Each cell has a positive and negative terminal made from platinum and uses a solid ceramic as an electrolyte—the material that moves the electric current from one terminal to the other—instead of polymers, which can degrade under heat.
In contrast, the MIT cell can withstand temperatures as high as 1,100°F, or 600° C, which allows the chip to be sterilized before it’s implanted.
As a fuel, the cells use glucose drawn from the bloodstream. Glucose is the body’s most abundant sugar and a key element in creating energy to operate biophysical processes.
The device can crank out 80 milliwatts of power, enough to run most implantable medical sensors and devices.
TRENDPOST: The new device shows that fuel cells made of non-toxic materials can work in the human body with no apparent ill effects and will make wearable, as well as implanted, medical tech easier and less inconvenient for wearers—and, as a result, much more popular.
MIT’s implantable nano-scale fuel cell.
Credit: Kent Dayton, MIT
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