Thanks! I can do my own programming usually. My hurdle will be electronics: I can do 80’s stuff - cuz that’s when I learned - but I’ve never done really small, low power designs with modern components. Electronics was only my minor at university, and that’s really my Achille’s heel.
But I’ll see about that after I get the doNExT in next month. Leveraging the implant’s blinkies to actually display useful data without logging 3 pounds of circuit board and batteries under my arm will be a challenge. That device too will be part of what I’ll be showing to whoever will be willing to hear about my project, so it’ll have to have a sleek and professional-looking design.
Was thinking about your implant. I kinda have been wondering if the xG3 is what you want to get.
You mention the need for it to be in a specific place. That makes me think you wouldn’t want it to migrate. So your options are, have it coated so it won’t migrate, as it is braced is position to heal, or…
Have Amal coat one with the magic he uses that would be made more for what you could be wanting. Might be able to add a tiny hole to add a place for a dissolving stitch, to hold it until it is healed in place, depending on if he can do that. I am imagining it coated in the plastic, with a small hole the tissue could grow in eventually also, same shape profile as the xG3.
I suspect an uncoated glass implant won’t be going anywhere inside a muscle, especially since it’s a long thin thing implanted parallel to a lot of long tough muscle strands that tend to contract around it at one end, and the base of a sinew at the other end, to prevent it from ever sliding out of the muscle if it ever managed to take a hike along the long axis.
As for coating it, I’m not sure it’s as simple as Amal cracking out the spray can of parylene Also, I don’t know how muscle fibers react to a subdermal conformal coating. Who’s to say I won’t end up with a massive reaction and a damaged muscle? For this one, I’d rather go uncoated.
The hole in the glass would require a lot more glass at the end of the implant than the current closing weld, meaning more heat, meaning the magnet would probably be ruined.
[Continuing this here, so as to avoid derailing the other thread…]
Is it an established fact that uncoated implants move around inside a muscle? What do they do exactly? Slide up and down the fibers? Get ejected? Can you point me to the relevant litterature about this, if you know of any?
I do believe it was part of VeriChip’s FDA filing in their IRB guided research, which is not public. From my understanding yes, as you flex your muscles it can tend to push around an implant quite a bit until it gets surrounded by collagen. Something to consider though, VeriChip used borosilicate glass which is biosafe, but does not illicit the same level of reaction from the body. The soda-lime glass we use does actually push the body to encapsulate it… there is a very tiny biological reaction to soda-lime glass, and this is one of many reasons we use it over cheaper borosilicate.
Interesting, thanks! Especially the bit about the glass: I didn’t know it actually made a difference in body reaction. I was under the impression that glass was pretty much inert whatever the glass, unless it was heavily loaded with metal.
I’m knee-deep in case reports of deep Implanon / Nexplanon reports at the moment. That particular implant is really useful for my own research: it’s much easier to find cases of deep implantation of that device than RFID or magnet implants.
No worries. I will dig around at work. I am just curious what/if their study is in my database at work. If it is, I can post public info about it that I find. I just can’t break the rules.
I likely wouldn’t be able to see anything like that anyways IF I can even find their stuff.
This experimental implant case report may be of interest. It describes a set of magnetic implants affixed to ocular muscles and orbital walls, to “lock down” the gaze of a patient with nystagmus - for lack of a better ultra-short description.
The interesting bits are the construction of the magnets themselves, and their attachment to the muscles:
Implant Design
We designed a 2-part rare-earth magnetic implant consisting of a small cylindrical ocular part designed to be sutured to an extraocular muscle near its insertion and within the tendinous sheath and a larger cylindrical orbital part designed to be fixed to the orbital wall. The thickness of the orbital magnet was conceived to be variable, guided by the external testing of prototypes of the same diameter, but of different lengths, externally before implantation (see below). The ocular magnet was designed to be made of sintered samarium–cobalt material, and the orbital magnet was designed to be made of sintered neodymium–iron–boron, with the magnetic axis in both being aligned to the cylindrical axis. The ocular magnet was a cylinder 3 mm in diameter and 1 mm in length, and the orbital magnet was a cylinder 3.73 mm in diameter and 2 mm in length. Because permanent magnetic materials are biologically reactive, each part was encased in grade 2 titanium, with laser welded joints, and the titanium cases included small flanges to facilitate suturing (for the ocular part) or gluing (for the orbital part). The final design was custom manufactured by Magnet Sales & Service Ltd (Swindon, United Kingdom). Note that the magnetic materials exhibit sufficient temperature stability to allow standard sterilization techniques to be applied.
Amal, when you have a chance, could you ask them if they would manufacture a few of the exact same magnets that are described in the medical case I linked to, i.e. with the attachment flanges?
My purpose here is not subdermals, but muscle attachment. This would be ideal for me. I was about to contact them myself, but you beat me to it. I don’t want to open a side channel and annoy them with yet another weirdo biohacker question, and possibly blow it for you.
Also, you’re a bona fide biohacking company: perhaps they’ll give the request more consideration than if it came from a random dude out in the sticks in northern Finland.
This is cool, and easily doable by us non-disabled people for the purpose of augmentation, with a simple visit to a piercer:
An xG3 fully implanted inside the tongue would be more aesthetically pleasing than a piercing (at least to me), but it might be a bit of a mouthful considering its size. Not to mention, it must hurt like a bitch. Has anybody ever injected a glass implant in the tongue?
Also, I bet I could do a better job than them with the sensors and control software, so the user wouldn’t have to stick their tongue out so much to get a meaningful signal out of the implant.
You could use a retainer on the roof of your mouth with a coin cell battery and 4-8 Hall effect sensors connected to a Bluetooth enabled microcontroller. Wouldn’t be much larger than a regular retainer and it would last a few hours on a charge.
If you used one of the rechargeable coin cells you could create the retainer out of a single resin cast like they conventionally do, with the electronics permanently embedded to properly encapsulate. It could be charged through two hard gold contacts with some pogo-pins
Sure, there’s a like a gazillion places where you can put Hall effect sensors in and around the mouth, for better reading of the implant’s position. But I meant even with the device as shown in the video, it must be fairly easy to get a better resolution than what they achieved.
I meant more from a DIY biohacking perspective. It would be pretty easy to make a magnetic sensing retainer and it would be invisible to external observers unless you smiled. You could use it as an input device on Bluetooth enabled devices. You could even roll your own Bluetooth voicebox and talk without moving your mouth.
Yeah I thought about the voicebox thing too. That would be a fantastic party trick
The mouth is a great area for augmentation without the help of doctors: it’s open yet kind of still on the inside, and much more resilient to infection.
If you use UHF RFID you could eliminate the head wearable and any batteries. NXP has(had) a UHF RFID chip called the G2IL+. The novel thing about this device is that it has a single bit digital input. It was originally intended as a security loop function, i.e. in removing the tag the loop breaks and an alarm is triggered. Now you can use several of these retainer mounted devices to a single or multiple antennas to create a tongue operated joystick. Alternatively if the user has head movement then they could be controlled by tilt switches (not mercury ;-)). A palate mounted UHF RFID tag will have a read-range of 1m at best, so 0.5m is a good compromise distance from head to reader.
Also, I don’t know how muscle fibers react to a subdermal conformal coating. Who’s to say I won’t end up with a massive reaction and a damaged muscle? For this one, I’d rather go uncoated.