Method devised for wirelessly powering, controlling devices inside body

A prototype device about the size of a grain of rice -- that can receive power and communicate wirelessly from inside the body -- for drug delivery, disease treatment or just health monitoring has been developed by researchers.

MIT researchers and scientists from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston have developed the tiny implants -- they expect they can be made even smaller than a grain of rice -- that are powered by radio frequency waves and can safely pass through human tissues.

The research on development of the devices will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Data Communication conference Aug. 20-25 in Budapest, Hungary.

"Even though these tiny implantable devices have no batteries, we can now communicate with them from a distance outside the body," senior paper Dr. Fadel Adib, an assistant professor in MIT's Media Lab, said in a press release. "This opens up entirely new types of medical applications."

CONTINUE READING ON www.upi.com