Dust-sized sensors may soon be available for treating epilepsy

In the future, our bodies will be full of tiny sensors continually monitoring our nerves, muscles and internal organs. That’s what a team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, believes — and they’ve just built the first prototype.

Neural dust
Each speck of the ‘neural dust’ they built is just three millimetres long, with a 1x1mm cross-section. Each sensor contains a piezoelectric crystal, as well as a pair of electrodes. The crystal means that the device doesn’t need a battery — pulses of ultrasound will both power it and allow it to transmit its data — the voltage across the electrodes.

The team has already tested the device on rats, implanting the sensors in the muscles and peripheral nerves of the animals. The results of those experiments have just been published in a paper in the journal Neuron.

Minimally invasive
“The vision is to implant these neural dust motes anywhere in the body, and have a patch over the implanted site send ultrasonic waves to wake up and receive necessary information from the motes for the desired therapy you want,” says Dongjin Seo, lead author on the Neuron paper.

“Eventually you would use multiple implants and one patch that would ping each implant individually, or all simultaneously,” says Seo. The data could be used to monitor different parts of the body, treating disorders like epilepsy or stimulating the immune system.

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