Medical implants will soon be flexible enough to be bent and move with your body as if they did not exist. Indeed, a scientific team from the University of Texas at Dallas has created a transistor composed of thin flexible layers which can be wrapped around a nerve or a blood vessel.
Researcher have used shape-memory polymers to create ultra-thin transistors which have a unique property that they are rigid at room temperature but when taken to the body temperature (about 37 ° C), they become flexible. It is even possible to wrap them around a structure with as small diameter as 2.25 mm. The experiments conducted on the mice have proved that when implanted in mice tissues these transistors were able to maintain their conductivity and flexibility.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpOE2AlDuEI[/youtube]
The researchers have been trying since long for the ways to implant electronics into human tissues but the main problem faced by them was the rigidity of these devices. Hence, it was required to have electronic devices which are rigid at room temperature so that they could easily be implanted into the body of the patients by surgeons. While at the body temperature these devices need to be flexible so that they become a part of the body tissues and could bend easily with it. Thanks to these new invention all that is possible now.
With this innovation, we can easily imagine that in future most of the connected health monitoring systems would be integrated into our bodies! However, we feel it will still take sometime before this is possible. Would you like to get the hyper flexible printed circuits implaned around your blood vessels?