Lots of radiation, including RF, gets absorbed by the charged, salty water that makes up much of the human body. Not only that, but as you might guess from its use in imaging, ultrasound goes right through us. That means an ultrasound antenna can easily catch enough waves to power a connected device. So it can be captured - and captured very efficiently. Remember the principle that you have to have an antenna that’s a reasonable fraction of an emission’s wavelength in order to capture it? Well, ultrasound has a wavelength measured in microns - millionths of a meter. Iota’s approach, however, has little to do with these traditional uses of the technology. Ultra-affordable ultrasound startup M-SCAN wins TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa In fact, a portable ultrasound company just won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in Lagos: There’s been a lot of focus on the venerable technology recently as technologists have found new applications for it. You’re probably familiar with ultrasound as a diagnostic tool, for imaging inside the body during pregnancy and the like - or possibly as a range-finding tool that “pings” nearby objects. You just think about it and all these things align.” “So were like, ‘I guess that’s it!’ ”īut some time after, Maharbiz had a “eureka” moment - “as weird as it sounds, it occurred to me in a parking lot. The physics just weren’t there,” he recalled. “There was a meeting at which everything died, because we were like two orders of magnitude away from what we needed. Much larger than was practical for devices meant to swim in the bloodstream. But they ran into a fundamental problem: RF radiation, because of its long wavelength, requires rather a large antenna to receive them. “The idea at first was to have free-floating motes in the brain with RF powering them,” Carmena said. The tips, sure, but they’re often connected to larger machines, or battery-powered packs, and they can rarely stay in the body for more than a few weeks or months due to various complications associated with them.Ĭonsidering how far we’ve come in other sectors when it comes to miniaturization, manufacturing techniques and power efficiency, Carmena and Maharbiz thought, why don’t we have something better? For instance, a microelectrode array in the brain might be able to help detect early signs of a seizure, and around the heart one could precisely test the rhythms of cardiac tissues.īut despite their name, microelectrodes aren’t really small. These devices are used all over medical and experimental science to monitor and stimulate nerves and muscle tissues. The team emerged from research at UC Berkeley, where co-founders Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz were working on improving the state of microelectrodes. Iota Biosciences wants to change that with millimeter-wide sensors that can live more or less permanently in your body and transmit wirelessly what they detect, and a $15 million Series A should put them well on their way. Fitness trackers and heart-rate monitors are all well and good, but if you want to track activity inside the body, the solutions aren’t nearly as convenient.
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