4 ms·
The medical community is working on systems that are far superior to this one, and they are brilliant. Some are already on the market: * Pacemakers / Artificia
by spartango 13y ago
The medical community is working on systems that are far superior to this one, and they are brilliant. Some are already on the market:
* Pacemakers / Artificial hearts (Heart diseases)
* Cochlear implants / Bone anchored hearing aids (Deafness)
* Insulin pumps (Diabetes)
* Deep brain stimulators (Parkinson's)
* Wireless gastrointestinal probes (GI disease/cancer)
They don't sound sexy, but these devices are now wireless sensor nodes with years of battery life. There are some next generation devices that are making their way onto the market as well, such as the Proteus Digital sensor[1] which was approved by the FDA last year.
I'm excited about progress in implantable technologies and also understand why their progress is seems slow--it takes a lot of work to ensure these devices are safe. That safety also necessitates a level of closedness for now: devices are only validated under carefully controlled conditions.
Efforts like this one, however, are incredibly unsafe. They endanger individuals while also making the DIY community look stupid.
[1] http://www.proteus.com/proteus-digital-health-announces-fda-clearance-of-ingestible-sensor/ http://www.proteus.com/proteus-digital-health-announces-fda-...
- Jach 13y agoThose are all cool, if you're sick or disabled in some way. What about for those of us who are healthy as a horse and want to supersede the natural state? What if I want to be able to sense EM fields, or put a sensor in me to monitor my sleep to avoid the hassle of a headband and a now-super-expensive Zeo, or put a bluetooth transmitter in me to ease data management between internal and external devices, or put a GPS sensor in me, or put a gyro&accelerometer in me that lets me do gestures independent of a wiimote or kinect, how about RFID in my hands and forehead? Of course those things aren't the coolest imaginable, but some things I can imagine would be really quite hard with the limitations of flesh. I'm currently content to be hopeful for mind uploading, then using artificial/robotic/simulacratic bodies of various sizes with lots of neat features for the times a version of me wishes to explore meatspace...