As delicate as the Second Sight surgical procedure must be, it has to be better than implanting the transmitting electrodes directly into the brain tissue, as they have done with some earlier experiments.
I am primarily hardware, but starting to branch more into software, and the MEMS that sound the most interesting to me are the ones dealing with ultrasound.
Slide 13 makes me believe that a primary sensor (perhaps a chemical sensor) could be powered by a micro-energy power source such as blood pressure pumping.
Pills for GI imaging: right now they do not contain MEMS, but lots of interest in getting a MEMS gyro in there and some propulsion, so that the pill could be controlled and flown through the gut. Right now it moves by peristaltic action only. Check out Given Imaging, Olympus.
Top US universities in MEMS (IMHO): UC Berkeley, UCLA, MIT, Stanford, U Mich, Cornell, UC Santa Barbara, Georgia Tech...many others doing great work too, but their research groups are smaller and so not as prolific.
@Victer: there are no neutral orgs working on MEMS reliability issues. Each company addresses it internally, with their own teams. Accelerated life testing is very difficult, if not intractable in MEMS, because most MEMS do not have a temp-related degradation mechanism.
@rswanson: as an EE who wants to get into medical MEMS - seek out a job at various medical device manufacturers: Boston Sci, Medtronic, Guidant, GE, etc. are all working on MEMS for medical
MEMS Ultrasound has been in active development for 15+ years - they are called "CMUTs" - Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasound Transducers. They are very promising for medical imaging, with the potential for much better image resolution than traditional PZT transducers
Microfluidics - I am not aware of proper design tools for microfluidic circuits. There are plenty of CFD tools out there: ANSYS, etc. and plenty of layout tools (Coventor, Tanner, AutoCAD), but none that I know specifically geared for microfluidic design.
Are there MEMS sensors for super cooled environments like liquid helium? It would be nice to measure the temperature without heating it up by the measuring device.
Gas sensors: I am not aware of one for Radon. There are many out there, I do think they have saturation issues and lifetime issues like traditional technology, but I'm not as familiar with them.
Thanks Alissa and Alex for the great overview. I don't have immediate applications, but some new ideas for the problemsolving toolbox. See all tomorrow.
Hi everyone. Lots of questions on the MEMS wireless sensors. They work just like a RFID chip - they are a passive LC circuit, and when activated by the reader, you measure a change in resonance that is calibrated to the physical phenomena of interest.
Ran - I guess its magnetic field.. not sure though,,-- the way i imagine is... trigger a sweep of frequencies outside the body..the implant resonaces at certain frequency and echoes it back.. you try to sense that echo..and find the pressure
Ran - Aorta sensor is by resonance.. ..the resonance of the implant changes wrt the pressure change around.. by sensing the resonance its pressure is back calculated.
ALISSA: Do you have information of the embedded pill that some engineering company and pharmaceutical are involved. I wonder how much MEMS are they using to measure PH as the pill travels in the digestive system.
@Alissa - Concerning the Aorta stent graft... Would you repeat how this device is powered and how its signal interface is accomplished? Wires? RF? Optical? Induction? Capacitive?
No experience with medical sensor, but have heard about a couple of them. This bring up the same question I was asking yesterday on reliability testing of MEMS devices. Is there any organization out there working on reliability requirement for MEMS devices ? How do we do accelerate life testing (Similar to transistor) with MEMS devices ? What is the min requirement ?
We designed MEMS chips for invitro drug delivery for the eye and lab on a chip for another customer. Main issues are FDA approvals and large chip sizes affecting yield and chip cost.
It looks like most of the MEMS devices are very small. From manufacturing standpoint, they will be difficult to have a large number of wafers order for a single devices. Is any of the MEMS application cross using some of the pressure sensor design out there ? Might be using different packaging available to make it applicable for different application ?
I design mobile autonomous robotic equipment designed to track and disable vehicles and people, I use many types of sensors, as heat, infrared, gyros, pressure, vision
I am the technical leader of the Acutronic iTS Lab (http://www.acutronic.com/global/us/test-solutions.html) where we test MEMS devices mostly in inertial sensors (Gyro, Accel, IMU, etc)
Am a mobile tech analyst. Mostly listening in to learn about sensors, where they are and will be and what their uses are. Also, Dr. Fitzgerald is such a rockstar in this field, I take advantage of every opportunity to hear her speak.
thought TPMS does not measure absolute pressure, but rather measures the rotational speed of each wheel and identifies a wheel that spins faster (underinflated)...
accel, gyros, pressure make sense for mems.. but i dont see why mems for light, temperature and chemical sensors...whay do they needs moving parts to sense?
Good afternoon Alex. It looks like there is a problem with the Slide Deck for days 3, 4, and 5. I keep getting an error message when I try to get them.
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