Implanted devices receive power wirelessly for new medical applications

In use, the devices could deliver drugs, monitor conditions inside the body, or treat disease by stimulating the brain with electricity or light. The implants are powered by radio frequency waves and in animal tests the researchers showed that the waves can power devices located 10cm deep in tissue from a distance of 1m.

“This opens up entirely new types of medical applications,” said Fadel Adib, an assistant professor in MIT’s Media Lab and a senior author of a paper describing the research, which will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM) conference in August 2018.

In their study, the researchers tested a prototype about the size of a grain of rice, but they anticipate that it could be made smaller.

“Having the capacity to communicate with these systems without the need for a battery would be a significant advance. These devices could be compatible with sensing conditions as well as aiding in the delivery of a drug,” said Giovanni Traverso, an assistant professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School, a research affiliate at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and an author of the paper.