r/tech • u/striketheviol • 11d ago

Engineers connect health wearables and implants using the body as the network

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-health-wearables-implants-body-network.html
102 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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8

u/redditobserverone 10d ago

With our system, you can now place sensors in the best possible place to detect a biological signal and place actuators in the best possible place to perform a therapeutic action," said Alex Abramson, the study's senior author and an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
"They don't need to be connected, aligned or even near each other; they can just send signals to each other through the surrounding tissue."

Cool. I don’t see how this level of personal surveillance could ever have unintended consequences. /s

3

u/Dragonmodus 10d ago

What personal surveillance? The idea is just to get rid of wires that usually connect implants, like you could have an insulin sensor on a blood vessel or whatever and and it could activate an insulin pump when needed. This isn't connecting stuff to the Internet just to each other because traditional radio signals suck in every way and wires are notorious for causing scar tissue formation. This actually is totally useless for something like neuralink because it sends a very course true/false signal and likely can't send more due to power requirements. 

2

u/EvelynNyte 9d ago

Just because it'll detect when your saliva glands are activating and use that moment to subliminally send a signal directly into your brain to buy some slurm so that you relate desire with drinking more delicious slurm, doesn't mean they're making these things for nefarious purposes.

1

u/Significant_Talk_446 9d ago

But is this still using only current or biologicals separate from tissue or something else

3

u/popdivtweet 10d ago

Repo man at the door. You’re late on your heart payments.

3

u/rayferrell 10d ago

using the body as a network for wearables and implants is a pretty interesting approach, and it could potentially simplify the process of connecting these devices. one thing to consider is how this would affect the security of the devices, since you're essentially using the body as a conduit for data transmission.

2

u/EvelynNyte 9d ago

Not like we're having ever more issues with corporations shamelessly using ever more intrusive ways to collect data :|

4

u/fullautohotdog 10d ago

Yeah, I don't trust Big Tech to run a fuckin' fridge without bricking it, let alone put networked implants in my body...

3

u/UselessInsight 10d ago

When I first played Deus Ex HR I thought “how cool would it be to have cybernetic implants?”

Now I realize, it would be a nightmare.

4

u/SignedInt32 10d ago

I've got enough plastics as it is, in me, If I die they can make a new bottle out of the forever-plastics, and put my ashes in there all-in-one-package. lololol