Microchips in medicine
Дипломная работа - Медицина, физкультура, здравоохранение
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nvisible, and the Jacobses will hardly know its there. The chip is fully biocompatible, Bolton says. No body fluids can get in, and nothing can be loosened or come out.Digital Solutions-which is trademarking the phrase Get Chipped!-has big plans for its little device. In the next few years, it wants to add sensors that will read your vital signs-pulse, temperature, blood sugar and so on-and a satellite receiver that can track where you are. The company makes a pager-like gadget called Digital Angel that does both those things, and its engineers are doing their darnedest to cram Digital Angels functions into a package small enough to implant. Once they do, VeriChip will be very powerful indeed. Thats one of the reasons the Jacobses want to get involved. There are endless possibilities, says Derek. For me its marvelous, says Leslie. Every day I worry about my husband. We definitely feel it will make us all feel more secure.
Security is part of the VeriChip business plan. The company has already signed a deal with the California department of corrections to track the movements of parolees using Digital Angel. Seelig believes VeriChip could function as a theftproof, counterfeit-proof ID, like having a drivers license embedded under your skin. He suggests that airline crews could wear one to ensure that terrorists dont infiltrate the cockpit in disguise. I travel quite a bit, he says, and I want to make sure the pilots in that plane belong there.the airlines or government really require pilots to get chipped? I think we have a right to demand that, says Seelig. Our lives are in their hands. It sounds extreme, but there are precedents. In the early 90s several states considered laws that would have required female child abusers and women on welfare to wear birth-control implants. The proposals were not very popular. Theres a feeling that technology has outpaced the policy process, says Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. We arent in a position to apply these new devices with the wisdom and prudence that is needed.or not, implant technology is racing ahead with bionic speed. Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England, is working on the next step. In a few weeks, he will receive an implant that will wirelessly connect the nerves in his arm to a PC. The computer will record the activity of his nervous system and stimulate the nerves to produce small movements and sensations; such an implant could eventually help a person suffering from paralysis to move parts of the body the brain cant reach. If all goes well, Warwick will put a companion chip in his wife Irena and let the two implants communicate with each other. If I move my finger, shell feel something, he explains. Well be closer than anybodys been before-nervous system to nervous system.are plenty of skeptics, but Jeffrey Jacobs is not one of them. People have been worried about Big Brother for years, he says. The three of us want to be part of not just this new technology but an evolution of humanity.FDA is expected to approve the Jacobses implants within two months, and there are other ways to speed up the evolution. Two weeks ago, Applied Digital Solutions signed a deal to distribute VeriChips in Brazil, where kidnapping has become epidemic, especially among the rich and powerful. Government officials hope that VeriChips implanted in people considered at high risk could be used to track victims via satellite. Here [in the U.S.] were still dealing with FDA and privacy and civil-liberties issues, says Bolton. But were not stopping. Were going into South America right now! Technology has a way of moving faster than legislation, and if it comes down to a race between cyborgs and Senators, guess who will win? Resistance is futile.
microchip technology in medicine
first bites of pizza fall into your eager stomach. All feels great, until you grab that extra slice and your gastric pacemaker awakens.tiny device, which doctors sewed onto your gut, watches what you eat. Whenever you overindulge, a faint shock makes you too ill for more.
Science fiction? No. The gastric pacemaker exists, and it's just one of many medical prototypes that run on microchips from Texas Instruments Inc.
Using TI's digital signal processor controller, the Boston Digital Arm gives amputees greater movement.Dallas-based company, which grew rich by planting tiny devices in machines, hopes to grow richer by planting them in you. It also hopes to heal many ills and enrich the Dallas area, where existing centers for medical research and mobile computing may spawn a medical computing hub.
"The potential is incredible," said TI chief executive Rich Templeton, explaining his company's plans for medical technology at a conference last week. "We're talking projects like restoring sight to the blind.", researchers at theUniversity of Southern California can already make blind patients "see."glasses send video to a computerized belt, which translates digital images to electrical pulses for the brain. Patients today see blocky images that evoke early video games. It's enough to navigate everyday tasks, though, and improvements are in the works.
arm
improving tie between tissue and silicon also underlies a new generation of artificial limbs.at UT Southwestern Medical Center have attached a mechanical arm, one wire per nerve, to a volunteer's shoulder. The man can now use his mind to move fingers, hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder.
closeup of the Boston Digital Arm.device still lacks the control needed for pro sports or safecracking, but it's an honest-to-goodness bionic arm.
"The cells sit right on top of the chips and talk to one another," said Dr. Dennis Stone, vice president for technology development at the Dallas hospital and research center.
"We're at the dawn of something huge, and Dallas is right in the middle of it."promise of microchip medicine lies not only in bionic body parts, but also long-term care for chronic problems.same TI chips that turn plastic boxes into cellphones can also turn pacemakers into cellphones.devices already reduce arduous office visits by sending information directly from a patient's chest to a doctor's computer. A smart pacemaker may someday sense a pending heart attack, call 911 and use a built-in GPS device to guide medics to a patient in crisis.chip-based devices may prevent that heart attack from ever happening.have used TI chips in prototype systems that constantly measure blood pressure. When readings get too high, the system zaps the gland that expands blood vessels during exercise. When blood vessels expand, blood pressure decreases.can also cut blood pressure, of course, but current medications sedate patients and produce other annoying side effects.
TI's digital signal processor controller, the Boston Digital Arm gives amputees greater movement.implants may produce fewer side effects when treating many conditions that drugs treat today. Blood thinners, antidepressants, painkillers: Those and other drugs work by affecting chemical levels inside your body. Smart mechanical devices, in theory, could eliminate the imprecision by telling your body exactly how to fix itself.
market
date, the total annual sales of medical microchips by all companies is just $2 billion.Instruments estimates it generated less than $200 million of its $14 billion revenue, but the potential market is enormous.world market for medical devices is $100 billion and growing by double-digit increments as machines do more and more. World drug sales exceeded $600 billion last year.execs think they're particularly well-positioned to infiltrate those markets.same attributes that suit chips for cellphones and other mobile devices - small size, low power consumption - suit them for human bodies.chips
also markets analog chips, chips that detect not ones and zeros but the vibrations, chemicals and electrical pulses the body uses to control itself.
"We may design custom chips once a technology nears major production, but researchers mostly use our existing products. We're getting a shot at a big new market without risking too many research dollars," said Doug Rasor, TI's vice president for emerging medical technologies.does spend money looking for talent and supplying its existing chips to promising researchers. The company says it's easier to get in at the ground floor than to win converts who have designed products with chips from other companies.. Rasor says it may take several years for the medical technology division to land a runaway hit. Testing requirements tend to slow medical progress, which is why the decoding of the human genome has yet to bring many new drugs to market.devices face fewer regulatory hurdles than drugs, though. TI hopes to cut the lapse between great idea and marketed product to three years. It seems an eternity to computer researchers but an eye blink compared with drugs, which generally take more than a decade to reach pharmacy shelves.
"Devices offer much faster time to market than pharmaceuticals," said Mir Imran, chief executive of InCube Laboratories and a major backer of the gastric pacemaker. "Today's new devices will be helping patients when today's new chemicals are still many years from government approval.
Conclusions
Microc