Injectable sensor implants the size of a rice grain that can generate vital body data via a smartphone app are becoming a mainstream innovation, according to a Swedish company pioneering the technology.
The tiny injectable implant models being designed by Swedish deep tech company, Dsruptive, allow users to access a reading of their body metrics by swiping a smartphone over the battery-free implants, which activates them to send data to an app.
“We want to enable people to be able to read their vital body parameters at any time and in any setting,” said Hannes Sjoblad, director at Dsruptive, a company which hit the headlines last year when a demo showed a covid-certificate being inputted on one of its xSIID implants.
Dsruptive has since made it clear these chips are not in any way designed to specifically store COVID vaccines, and that the demo was just showing they can store pretty much anything.
“Implants can be used for many things, and one of them is that the user of a chip can add any info they want to their device,” Dsruptive said in a statement. “This can be for example links to websites, a vcard-file or a link to a covid certificate. DSruptive has no control over insight into what the users of our tech put on their devices.”
While the chips can store a variety of information that could, for example, allow for easy payments to be made via a scanner, the sensor equipped implants could deliver a transformative impact on health care.
Last year Dsruptive Subdermals conducted a clinical study into the use of injectable implants to measure body temperature. The world-first study showed the technology could perform on a par with current clinical methods being used to take temperature readings.
Dr Daniel Andersson, head researcher of the implant study, and Associate Professor of physiology, Karolinska University Hospital, said: “Potential clinical applications for this type of device include home monitoring, where you could use implants to have a much better surveillance of the patient.”
Dsruptive says it is “convinced that sensor equipped implants represent a new paradigm in health care” and Sjoblad said the goal is to see “one billion people implanted by 2030”.
