Researchers are charging ahead with plans for edible batteries to power up internal medical devices.
Don’t you just hate it when you discover your smartphone has been drained down to 2% and you can’t find your charger because “someone” has borrowed it then not put it back in the place where it usually lives?
It must be even worse when you have an electronic implant or other internal medical device that needs recharging, requiring a time-consuming and disruptive hospital visit every time it switches itself to low-power mode.
Thankfully, boffins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think they may have come up with a solution to this problem in the form of ingestible paper batteries that can power up internal medical devices then harmlessly break down in the body once the job is done.
Publishing this month in the journal, Nature Chemical Engineering, a team at MIT explain how they have developed a battery made of magnesium and molybdenum trioxide that generates a peak voltage of 1.84 volts and can keep working inside an animal’s stomach for up to three days.
According to the study, the edible battery was used to power a wireless tag in the throat that communicated with a receiver 1.5 metres away. It was also able to charge up a capsule that electrically stimulated the stomach for 20 minutes, an approach that is used to treat gut conditions that affect how the stomach empties.
The technology could be used to support temporary devices that track medication use or deliver electrical stimulation without needing to be removed later, the research team said.
“Critically, the system eliminates the need for retrieval procedures, reduces the risk of device retention and minimises electronic waste in the GI tract highlighting an important step toward sustainable, patient-friendly bioelectronic medicine,” they said.
If all that sounds rather promising for folks who need internal electronic devices, unfortunately the researchers were also quick to add quite a few caveats surrounding the technology, chief among those being that the battery, so far, has only been tested on a small number of pigs.
A second cautionary note was that while the battery “mostly” breaks down within the body, not all of it does. The battery’s circuit board, at this stage, remains indigestible and has to be pooped out of the porkers’ posterior once it’s done its business.
On the plus side, the authors observed that no notable tissue damage to the pigs was caused by eating the ingestible batteries.
Unsurprisingly, the team said further studies were needed to assess long-term safety and to develop fully bioresorbable devices before testing in humans could begin.
We can only hope that the ingestible batteries of the future are designed to work across a brand-agnostic range of devices, unlike our current device chargers.
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