Eco-friendly Power for Medical-Implant Devices: Green Technology Articles: Eco20/20

Eco-friendly Power for Medical-Implant Devices

Eco-friendly advancements are sweeping into the medical field; and some of the most heartening developments are in energy-sustainability. Researchers are expanding the options both for the direct continuous powering of medical implants and for the wireless charging of batteries for implanted devices that are traditionally charged by attachment to an external device.

Brilliant, Eco-Friendly, Options

* Hospital visits are never a welcome event, so reducing the frequency of pace-maker battery replacements is near the top of every heart patient's list.

o The technology is at now hand for embedding a spectrometric device under a patient's skin that will use sunlight for recharging an implanted medical device, such as a pacemaker, or for powering implanted micro-computers that could store the medical records of a patient.

* The prospect of blindness is a terrifying reality for patients with degenerative eye diseases.

o Researchers at Stanford University are working on an eye implant for patients with diseases that cause light-sensing photoreceptors to die. The implant is basically a mini-array of tiny, flexible photovoltaic cells, placed under the retina. A pocket processor, attached to a video camera, sends a video feed to special goggles that send infrared light pulses to the photovoltaic device in the eye. The light pulses power the implanted device and cause it to generate electricity, which stimulates the retina above to produce a visual signal the brain can process. The implant is currently only able to stimulate 20/200 vision (still legally blind), but if that can be improved to 20/100, the recipient would see well enough to recognize faces.

* Coming from Fujitsu Laboratories is a hybrid device able to collect energy from light or heat.

o Another excellent option. It's made from organic materials that incorporate photovoltaic cell technology together with thermoelectric capabilities. And it's flexible, so it can be fitted to different implants.

Surprising Concerns

* Some people see implant applications from any technology as a mixed blessing. The medical benefits of these sustainability options are tremendously appealing; but some advocates boast that implant technologies can be implemented in criminal monitoring and opponents fear the possibility of population control devices, (green or otherwise).

o The idea is no longer beyond the realm of possibility that courts may one day order bodily-implantation of a device that can analyze the consumption of alcohol, or record the GPS locations of criminal offenders subject to monitoring. Any technology can, of course, be abused in the wrong hands.

It's a peculiar notion, unnerving in a way, to realize that green-technology has come so far that it now faces dilemmas so common to the realm of more traditional, more aggressive, technologies. A man named Don Marquis once said, "The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race - is the human race." Hopefully, we won't put ourselves in the way of good medicine, by once again turning progress into a problem.