Although human arsenal is loaded to the brim, the most valuable element in there is our ability to find solutions. You see, when you are able to come up with solutions on a rather consistent basis, you end up unlocking some really unique growth avenues over time, and that, in turn, can go on to produce many notable by-products. However, if we look back and assess these by-products in hindsight, we’ll see how none of them even come close to matching technology. Technology gets to be an anomaly here for a lot of reasons, but we start with its unprecedented skill-set. The creation arrived on the scene bearing capabilities that we had never seen before. Once you are done checking out the said element, you can move on to the way technology, again unlike every other concept, was so successful in impacting our entire spectrum. This would create a host of beneficiaries, and a notable one among them will be our global healthcare spectrum. Technology’s link-up with healthcare was such a pivotal moment, as it came at a time when the sector was literally running on fumes. Now, we did have slight hesitation about allowing the creation to take over an area of this magnitude, but we gave in and honestly, we were rewarded in a much bigger manner than what we expected. In fact, one recent development from MIT does a lot to prove the same.
The researching team at MIT has successfully developed a glucose fuel cell, which can be used to power medical implants. Reportedly as big as a human hair, the device uses our blood sugar to charge itself, therefore making implants more self-sustainable than they are at the moment. Talk about the current scenario, the implantation technology, despite being so groundbreaking, continues to face an existential problem of power. While the battery-powered devices require constant removal and replacement, the ones involving a wired setup come with sizeable inconvenience and infection risk. Hence, the idea of charging the device using our own bodies can effectively transform how implantation technology works, and by doing so, it can also consolidate the insane potential of real-time monitoring.
“Glucose is everywhere in the body, and the idea is to harvest this readily available energy and use it to power implantable devices,” said Philipp Simons, a researcher involved in the study. “In our work we show a new glucose fuel cell electrochemistry.”
According to certain reports, the researching team has already tested the fuel cell in a controlled setting. Their observation shows a peak voltage production of around 80 millivolts, which is just about what most implantation devices need.
