This is a conspirator's worst nightmare. A tiny chip the size of just one-tenth of a cubic millimeter can be easily injected into the body to monitor its temperature in real-time. All it needs is ultrasound and similar systems are likely to be the future of medicine.
Credit: Chen Shi/Columbia Engineering.
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We can’t stop the miniaturization of electronics. It’s ongoing and promises to bring many interesting applications, for example, in medicine. Miniature systems can monitor our organism or even perhaps help us. For many serious diseases, this could be a major game-changer.
Recently, experts from Columbia University introduced an extreme version of this technology. They developed a single-chip system that seems to be the smallest in the world. It can be injected into the body where it measures temperature and with a bit of work, it could certainly do much more. It’s like a conspirator’s worst nightmare as it can fit into a volume of less than 0.1 cubic millimeters.
The record-breaking small system on a chip is about the size of a tiny mite that lives in the dust of your homes. To truly see it you need a microscope. Making something so small and making sure it has enough energy and can transmit data wasn’t an easy job. Usually, small electronic devices use radio waves. But those are too large for this system. So, the developers of this system used a piezoelectric system that works both as an antenna for wireless charging but also for communication through ultrasound.
The result is a unique system on a chip that monitors the temperature of a body in real-time. It also detects any changes in temperature that are caused because of the treatment itself. So far, the system has been only tested on lab rats. They used it for neurostimulation and they also managed to inject seven of these systems on a chip into a single muscle of a lab rat at once.
In the future, similar chips could not only measure the temperature but also blood pressure, glucose levels, or even breathing. The most amazing thing about this feat of engineering is the sheer fact that it is a fully functional electronic system and it and its future cousins have huge potential in medicine and many other fields.
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