Wearable Chips-Implanted

Illustration by Stewart Scott-Curran, CNN

The doctor inside you

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IDEA:

The next wave of wearable tech will be under our skin

WHO'S BEHIND IT?

Tech entrepreneurs, the medical industry

WHAT COULD IT DO?

Improve preventative medicine through constant health monitoring

HOW CLOSE IS IT TO BECOMING REALITY?

Several years away

By Heather Kelly, CNN

Wearable sensors might have been considered strange a few years ago, but now we're used to devices like FitBits and sensor-filled smartphones monitoring our movements, tallying calories, observing sleep patterns and even tracking heart rate, blood-sugar levels and other vitals.

The next step will be tiny sensors under our skin, coursing through our bloodstreams and implanted in our brains to collect valuable information about our health. Doctors already implant devices such as pacemakers in our bodies, but sensors are a more advanced and delicate technology that requires additional research.

"What is lacking are electronics in direct intimate contact with the body, sensing or actuating. We are presently mostly inserting electrodes but not genuinely electronics," said Paul Berger, a professor of electrical and computer-engineering physics at Ohio State University who has worked with implantable sensors. "This area has huge growth opportunities."

Another researcher, Michael Strano, and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a hydrogel that can be implanted under the skin like a tattoo and used to monitor nitric oxide levels. Next, they hope to expand the technology to work on glucose.

Other sensors can monitor implants as they heal or detect early signs of organ rejection after a transplant. A sensor in the human brain could even help people control a prosthesis or use assistive technologies such as wheelchairs.

"The most revolutionary aspect will be the ability for patients to analyze and understand biochemical signaling and metabolism within their bodies and how this is influenced by their diet, lifestyle and environment," Strano said. "It will be enormously enabling."

Researchers need to puzzle out many issues before this technology can go mainstream, including power supply, wireless data transmission and rejection or degeneration over time by the human body. Even so, some versions of implantable sensors are already in use: We use them to help track our pets.

Being able to constantly collect data about someone's health could keep hospital costs down by catching diseases early and helping the ill or elderly manage their own health between doctors' visits. Over time, something as simple as a smartphone app could detect anomalies in a patient's health data and automatically contact their doctor.

Taken together, massive amounts of health information uploaded from sensors to the cloud could be an important tool for researchers mining big data to learn more about diseases and treatments. Algorithms could sift through the information for clues about what keeps us healthy or makes us sick.

And while most implantable sensors are focused on health, the technology could have more uses in the future, including environmental monitoring, space exploration and security.

"It turns out that the engineering problem of generating and collecting a signal from within the human body is useful for many other remote sensing applications," Strano said. Who knows? In a decade, we may all be wearing microchips.