Invisible Implants Open New Window Into the Brain

A team of engineers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) are developing invisible implantable medical sensor arrays. The new technology has applications in a variety of fields ranging from neuroscience to cardiac care. Neural researchers currently study, monitor or stimulate the brain using imaging techniques in conjunction with implantable sensors that allow them to continuously capture and associate fleeting brain signals with the brain activity they can see. However, it’s difficult to see brain activity when there are sensors blocking the view. “One of the holy grails of neural implant technology is that we’d really like to have an implant device that doesn’t interfere with any of the traditional imaging diagnostics,” said a biomedical engineering professor from UW-Madison. “A traditional implant looks like a square of dots, and you can’t see anything under it. We want to make a transparent electronic device.” The engineers chose graphene, a material gaining wider use in everything from solar cells to electronics due to its versatility and biocompatibility. To read more about this research, click here.