Science and Tech Blog: Article 10 3/28/2010

Electronic Cells for our Human Cells

In this article, researchers from the University of Illinois as well as Northwestern University engineered a single crystal silicon layer that wraps around a network of sensors that can detect your exact heart beats. They have created these patches to place on your heart while the 2,000 silicon nanomembrane transistors accurately detect every heart beat. This new technology is much more efficient, cost effective, and reliable than previous methods. Before this new market changing idea, the previous method was not accurate in the way that doctors could not track the patient’s heart beat live, it had to be recorded, then the stats and data was later read by a doctor. Where as now, with this new creation, doctors can read the data the millisecond it is sent to his computer, allowing for much more precision while testing each and every patient.
This new sensor is not yet ready for, or available for daily use in the field. More testing is required, but look for this in your local hospitals soon, but I hope you won’t need to have them used on you.
But is this a trend for the future? Will sensors soon be permanently place through out your body that monitor your diagnostics every second, of every day, for the rest of our lives? Possibly. In my opinion that may not be bad for people who are terminally ill or have serious health concerns. With the readily available technology that surrounds us, maybe we can next program this in body computer to send text messages to our phones to tell us when we need a dose of our medicine, or when it is detecting a new problem and that we should see a doctor soon. Just another way technology is continually evolving to help make human life happier and healthier!