Göran Gustafsson looks at people and thinks of cars—the ageing models that rolled off assembly lines a few decades ago. Today, says Gustafsson, cars are packed with cutting-edge sensors, computers and sophisticated communications systems that warn of problems when they are still easy to fix, which is why modern vehicles rarely surprise their drivers with catastrophic breakdowns.
“Why don't we have a similar vision for our bodies?” wonders Gustafsson, an engineer whose team at the Swedish electronics company Acreo, based in Kista, is one of many around the world trying to make such a vision possible. Instead of letting health problems go undetected until a person ends up in hospital—the medical equivalent of a roadside breakdown—these teams foresee a future in which humans are wired up like cars, with sensors that form a similar early-warning system.
Working with researchers at Linköping University in Sweden, Gustafsson's team has developed skin-surface and implanted sensors, as well as an in-body intranet that can link devices while keeping them private. Other groups are developing technologies ranging from skin patches that sense arterial stiffening—a signal of a looming heart attack—to devices that detect epileptic fits and automatically deliver drugs directly to affected areas of the brain.
These next-generation devices are designed to function alongside tissue, rather than be isolated from it like most pacemakers and other electronic devices already used in the body. But making this integration work is no easy feat, especially for materials scientists, who must shrink circuits radically, make flexible and stretchable electronics that are imperceptible to tissue, and find innovative ways to create interfaces with the body. Achieving Gustafsson's vision—in which devices monitor and treat the body day in, day out—will also require both new power sources and new ways of transmitting information.
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