‘Skin-tenna’ wireless signals creep over human skin
A wireless antenna that channels signals along human skin could broadcast signals over your body to connect up medical implants or portable gadgets.
The new power-efficient approach could make more of established medical devices like pacemakers or help future implants distributed around the body work together.
Just one of the small hockey-puck-like antennas developed at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, would be able to connect to gadgets anywhere else on the body, says William Scanlon who made the design with colleague Gareth Conway.
The new design’s ability to produce signals that creep along the skin makes it more efficient than existing battery-hungry technologies such as Bluetooth, says Scanlon – an important factor for medical devices which need long life-spans.
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