5 ms·

Are the power and electronics embedded in the skin for a specific reason? I would much rather have a plug in my head and have all of the electronics and battery

• caycep 13y ago
  infection and wound healing. Breaks in the skin are always a huge infection risk, compounded by the fact that implanted hardware is always an infection risk, especially ones that are exposed. The reason being that implants do not have convenient blood vessels coursing through them like us meat bags, and thus the white blood cells that fight infection can't really clear any bacteria that happens to stick onto the surface of these things. Keeping things under the skin solves a lot of these problems. The experimental Utah arrays with the Braingate consortium are in fact externalized, (mostly due to bandwidth limitations of the hardware) and managing those folks are pretty tricky. A port would be nice - I think a more pressing need for "ports" would be the critical care and oncology (cancer) folks - patients who need to provide access to the bloodstream. Central lines, dialysis fistulas, chemotherapy ports are all notorious for getting infection. We're not talking about a minor infection of a cut, say, but serious risks like abcesses and sepsis and meningitis here (especially re brain implants who cross the meninges and into brainspace...don't want bacteria happily munching away there...) That being said, the next evolution of the brain-machine interfaces that use high-bandwith data and power transfer to get around the whole pesky skin issue.