A tiny, four-fingered “hand” folded from a single piece of DNA can pick up the virus that causes COVID-19 for highly sensitive rapid detection and can even block viral particles from entering cells to infect them, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers report. Dubbed the NanoGripper, the nanorobotic hand also could be programmed to interact with other viruses or to recognize cell surface markers for targeted drug delivery, such as for cancer treatment.&nbsp;Led by <a href="https://bioengineering.illinois.edu/people/xingw">Xing Wang</a>, a professor of <a href="https://bioengineering.illinois.edu/">bioengineering</a> and of <a href="https://chemistry.illinois.edu/">chemistry</a> at the U. of I., the researchers describe their advance in the journal <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adi2084">Science Robotics</a>.&nbsp;Inspired by the gripping power of the human hand and bird claws, the researchers designed the NanoGripper with four bendable fingers and a palm, all in one nanostructure folded from a single piece of DNA. Each finger has three joints, like a human finger, and the angle and degree of bending are determined by the design on the DNA scaffold.&nbsp;<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1733792836250-232743.jpg" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Inspired by the human hand or bird claws, the NanoGripper has four fingers and a palm, all folded from one piece of DNA. Image courtesy of Xing Wang“We wanted to make a soft material, nanoscale robot with grabbing functions that never have been seen before, to interact with cells, viruses and other molecules for biomedical applications,” Wang said. “We are using DNA for its structural properties. It is strong, flexible and programmable. Yet even in the DNA origami field, this is novel in terms of the design principle. We fold one long strand of DNA back and forth to make all of the elements, both the static and moving pieces, in one step.”The fingers contain regions called DNA aptamers that are specially programmed to bind to molecular targets — the spike protein of the virus that causes COVID-19, for this first application ­— and trigger the fingers to bend to wrap around the target. On the opposite side, where the wrist would be, the NanoGripper can attach to a surface or other larger complex for biomedical applications such as sensing or drug delivery.&nbsp;To create a sensor to detect the COVID-19 virus, Wang’s team partnered with a group led by Illinois electrical and computer engineering professor <a href="https://ece.illinois.edu/about/directory/faculty/bcunning">Brian Cunningham</a>, who specializes in biosensing. They coupled the NanoGripper with a photonic crystal sensor platform to create a rapid, 30-minute COVID-19 test matching the sensitivity of the gold-standard qPCR molecular tests used by hospitals, which are more accurate than at-home tests but take much longer. &nbsp;&nbsp;“Our test is very fast and simple since we detect the intact virus directly,” Cunningham said. “When the virus is held in the NanoGripper’s hand, a fluorescent molecule is triggered to release light when illuminated by an LED or laser. When a large number of fluorescent molecules are concentrated upon a single virus, it becomes bright enough in our detection system to count each virus individually.”&nbsp;<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1733792872784-232744.jpg" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">The NanoGripper can be designed to detect a number of viruses or other molecules, or even for targeted drug delivery for cancer treatment, the researchers say. Pictured, from left: researcher Wei Hong, graduate student Linh Le, postdoctoral researcher Mengxi Zheng, Professor Xing Wang, Professor Brian Cunningham, graduate student Skye Shepherd, research fellow Tingjie Song and postdoctoral researcher Saurabh Umrao.In addition to diagnostics, the NanoGripper could have applications in preventive medicine by blocking viruses from entering and infecting cells, Wang said. The researchers found that when NanoGrippers were added to cell cultures that were then exposed to COVID-19, multiple grippers would wrap around the outside of the viruses. This blocked the viral spike proteins from interacting with receptors on the cells’ surface, preventing infection.&nbsp;“It would be very difficult to apply it after a person is infected, but there’s a way we could use it as a preventive therapeutic,” Wang said. “We could make an anti-viral nasal spray compound. The nose is the hot spot for respiratory viruses, like COVID or influenza. A nasal spray with the NanoGripper could prevent inhaled viruses from interacting with the cells in the nose.”&nbsp;<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1733792895626-232746.png" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">An artistic rendering of the NanoGripper’s applications. Sites on the gripper’s fingers recognize the spike protein of a virus, inset, and trigger fluorescent tags to emit light. When coupled with a sensor, individual viruses can be detected for a rapid COVID test, foreground. Alternately, the NanoGrippers can block viruses from entering cells by wrapping around the spike proteins, top right.The NanoGripper could easily be engineered to target other viruses, such as influenza, HIV or hepatitis B, Wang said. In addition, Wang envisions using the NaoGripper for targeted drug delivery. For example, the fingers could be programmed to identify specific cancer markers, and grippers could carry cancer-fighting treatments directly to the target cells.“This approach has bigger potential than the few examples we demonstrated in this work,” Wang said. “There are some adjustments we would have to make with the 3D structure, the stability and the targeting aptamers or nanobodies, but we’ve developed several techniques to do this in the lab. Of course it would require a lot of testing, but the potential applications for cancer treatment and the sensitivity achieved for diagnostic applications showcase the power of soft nanorobotics.” &nbsp;<hr>The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation supported this work. Wang and Cunningham are affiliated with the <a href="https://www.igb.illinois.edu/">Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology</a> and the&nbsp;<a href="https://hmntl.illinois.edu/">Holonyak Micro and Nanotechnology Lab</a> at the U. of I.&nbsp;

Illinois researchers developed a nanorobotic hand made of DNA that can grab viruses for detection or inhibition. In this artist’s rendering, three “NanoGripper” hands wrap around a COVID-19 virus. Image courtesy of Xing Wang

A tiny, four-fingered “hand” folded from a single piece of DNA can pick up the virus that causes COVID-19 for highly sensitive rapid detection and can even block viral particles from entering cells to infect them, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers report.

Nanorobot hand made of DNA grabs viruses for diagnostics and blocks cell entry

In this episode, we explore a groundbreaking neurotechnology that boosts memory without the need for invasive surgery potentially helping people all over the world struggling with spatial memory.

Podcast: Non-invasive Memory Booster

Every year, roughly 1.2 million patients experience adverse outcomes associated with injectable medications, and these errors are estimated to cost about $5 billion. A team including a researcher from Carnegie Mellon University has developed the first wearable camera that uses artificial intelligence to help prevent such errors.“The goal of our system is to catch these drug administration errors in real-time, before the injection, and provide an alert so the clinician has a chance to intervene before any patient harm,” said Justin Chan, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science’s <a href="https://s3d.cmu.edu/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Software and Societal Systems DepartmentOpens in new window</a> and the College of Engineering’s <a href="https://ece.cmu.edu/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Department of&nbsp;Electrical and Computer EngineeringOpens in new window</a>.In addition to Chan, the team included researchers from the University of Washington, Makerere University and the Toyota Research Institute.The error rate for all drugs given in a hospital is about 5 to 10 percent, and they can happen at all levels of care. To design the wearable camera system, researchers focused on training deep learning algorithms that could detect errors when a clinician transfers a drug from a vial into a syringe. These could be vial swap errors, which occur when the wrong vial is used or the drug label on the syringe is incorrect; or syringe swaps, when the label is correct but the clinician administers the wrong drug. To prevent errors, hospitals use safeguards like requiring barcode scanning for syringes, but in high-pressure situations, clinicians can forget to scan the drug’s barcode or manually record its contents.<blockquote>The goal of our system is to catch these drug administration errors in real-time, before the injection, and provide an alert so the clinician has a chance to intervene before any patient harm.<cite>Justin Chan, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering</cite></blockquote>In their study, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01295-2" rel="noopener" target="_blank">published in npj Digital MedicineOpens in new window</a>, researchers demonstrated how the AI-enabled wearable camera system could detect vial swap errors with a sensitivity of 99.6 percent and a specificity of 98.8 percent.Chan said creating the deep learning system to detect errors as they happen was challenging because syringes, vials and drug labels are small and clinicians can inadvertently obscure them when handling them. Researchers collected a large training dataset from different operating room environments with different backgrounds and lighting conditions. They collected footage using a small head-mounted camera strapped to physicians’ foreheads, and the camera was tilted down to film the providers’ hands. Over 55 days, they collected 4K video footage of drug preparation events from 13 anesthesiology providers and 17 operating rooms in two hospitals.“We designed the algorithm so that instead of reading the label text, which can be obscured, it only needs to catch a glimpse of visual cues like vial and syringe shape, label color, and font size for a short period of time to classify what the drug is,” Chan said.Now that researchers have shown the accuracy of the system, their next step is incorporating the system into smart eyewear that can provide visual or auditory warnings to clinicians before a drug is delivered to a patient.“This work demonstrates how AI-enabled systems can serve as a second set of ‘eyes’ to improve healthcare practices and patient safety,” Chan said. “When integrated into an electronic medical system, our system also opens up opportunities for automatic documentation of drug information and can reduce the overhead of manual record-keeping.”

Researchers develop the first wearable camera that uses artificial intelligence to help prevent medical administration errors.

A new set of eyes

<a href="https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/about/index.html/" target="_blank">Six in 10</a> Americans are living with at least one chronic disease, and four in 10 Americans have two or more chronic diseases. Some of those diseases, such as hypothyroidism and inflammatory diseases, require individuals to carefully track certain blood tests in order to manage their conditions. Unfortunately, that usually means an onerous cycle of scheduling appointments, traveling to hospitals, and waiting for lab results.Now SiPhox Health is working to help patients and their doctors manage diseases from the comfort of their home with a new kind of blood test based on a silicon photonic chip. The system is the size of a coffee maker and can produce precise readings for 20 different biomarkers.The chip-based device is not yet FDA-cleared, so it is currently only being used for research purposes, but SiPhox also provides mail-in blood testing to thousands of people with chronic diseases, both directly and through other health care and wellness businesses, using approved technology. The company hopes its new system can soon deliver faster results to every home that needs it.“A lot of blood tests aren’t done because they're too inconvenient,” SiPhox founder and former MIT researcher Michael Dubrovsky says. “People skip scheduled blood tests, and physicians don’t always prescribe blood tests because they know it’s inconvenient. That requires them to base their decisions on symptoms, and that’s not optimal for many of these chronic diseases.”Dubrovsky and SiPhox co-founder Diedrik Vermeulen met at MIT while researching photonic chip and laser technology. They see SiPhox’s technology as the latest in a long trend toward smaller and more scalable devices as they are condensed onto integrated chips.“Biolabs typically do blood testing with these large instruments that are full of optics, lasers, lenses, mirrors, and all these very expensive features,” Vermeulen says. “We don’t change any of the main features. We leave all the optics the same, but we miniaturize it onto our chips and make it so scalable that you can ship it to homes. It’s like how computers used to be the size of a room and you could only find them in high-end universities — now they’re all on a chip. We’re doing the same for blood testing.”<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1731976955976-MIT-SiPhox-03-press.jpg" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">"We can offer a new way for people to access health care in their home," Vermeulen says. Pictured is an example of the package sent to clients. Image: Courtesy of SiPhox Health<h2>Photonic chips with electric properties</h2>Dubrovsky and Vermeulen met through the MIT ecosystem in 2019. Vermeulen had worked in MIT’s Silicon Photonics Group within the Research Laboratory of Electronics and Dubrovsky was working in the MIT Materials for Micro and Nano Systems group.The two quickly bonded over a new way to approach optical chips.“We had this idea of doing optical chips more like a printed circuit board,” Vermeulen explains. “Electrical chips incorporate a lot of chips on one circuit board, but optical chips typically do everything with a single chip. We wanted to combine optical chips into a new kind of circuit board.”The founders met regularly in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship to refine their approach. In February of 2020, they started filing patents and receiving guidance from MIT professors. They also entered the START.nano program, which helps early-stage companies accelerate their innovations by giving them access to MIT.nano’s laboratories and equipment.The same lasers that are used to mass produce traditional silicon chips can be used to manufacture SiPhox’s integrated photonic silicon chips. Each 1-millimeter chip contains lenses, polarizers, modulators, splitters, and other optical components you’d see in a traditional lab-based system, but SiPhox’s chips are cheap enough to be single-use.Just as the founders were deciding on the first application for their new chip, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. They took that as a sign.“We decided to focus on biosensing, with one of our chips being disposable and the other one being reusable,” Vermeulen says.The founders worked to detect infectious disease with their chips but realized the technology was better suited for high-fidelity blood testing.“I worked a lot on tunable lasers at MIT, and we use a slightly different approach to lasers at SiPhox,” Vermeulen says. “We applied all of the lessons we learned at MIT to design something from scratch.”SiPhox’s chip testing system works with third-party arm patches that people already use to collect blood samples at home. Dubrovsky likens the system to a Nespresso machine in which users simply place a pod into the machine and press a button. Each of SiPhox’s disposable cartridges contains an array of photonic immunoassay sensors that can be used to detect specific proteins or hormones.The system includes a dashboard that can be viewed by a physician or the patient themselves to get biomarker data at home. The dashboard also provides historic data and educational content about the biomarkers measured. SiPhox also uses large language models to parse third-party blood test data, allowing users to track traditional blood tests in the same dashboard.Because the approach makes use of semiconductor lasers and silicon chips, the founders say a single traditional chip manufacturing facility, or fab, could produce 1 billion of SiPhox’s chips every month.“Our technology is very scalable because it’s all on a chip,” Vermeulen says. “There are only two ways to really scale something: You can do injection molding; that’s how you produce billions of plastic cups, for instance. But if you want to scale something very complex, you have to put it on a silicon chip.”<h2>A platform for health</h2>The founders believe their technology could enable a world where tracking biomarkers is as easy as brushing your teeth. That would have huge implications for the tens of millions of Americans who need to get regular blood tests to manage chronic diseases.“For people with inflammatory diseases, tracking inflammation levels is very important because they can develop resistance to their medicine,” Dubrovsky says. “Once they experience symptoms of a flare-up, it’s very hard to reverse. And these symptoms can be horrible, so catching it early is really important.”To gain FDA clearance, SiPhox plans to begin studies in coming months, but its system’s accuracy has already been validated by third parties, and the company’s Burlington, Massachusetts, facility is capable of manufacturing about 10,000 of its cartridges per month.Once SiPhox gains FDA clearance, it plans to partner with health care systems, health insurers, employers, and mail-in blood testing companies to help people everywhere track their health.“We can offer a new way for people to access health care in their home,” Vermeulen says. “Once they have our blood testing device, whether for a chronic disease or something else, anytime they want telehealth-enabled by blood testing, they can use our device, similar to how Apple users have access to third-party apps from many different service providers. Siphox users will have access to curated third-party services built on top of the core blood testing capability.”

SiPhox Health is working to help patients and their doctors manage diseases from the comfort of their home with a new kind of blood test based on a silicon photonic chip. Image: Courtesy of SiPhox Health

The startup SiPhox, founded by two former MIT researchers, has developed an integrated photonic chip for high-quality, home-based blood testing.

Bringing lab testing to the home

Did you know that injection molding is transforming the medical device industry? This advanced process empowers designers to create high-quality and cost-effective products, ranging from common medical items to highly regulated devices. As products move through various stages of development—from initial prototyping to full-scale production—they must consistently meet stringent compliance, safety, and functionality standards. This ensures that each medical device aligns with critical industry requirements at every step.If you’re considering taking the next step in medical injection molding, this article will guide you through 4 key considerations in medical injection molding, from understanding device classifications and regulations to selecting suitable materials and preparing your design.<h2 dir="ltr">Key Considerations in Medical Injection Molding</h2><h3 dir="ltr">1. Regulatory Compliance: Meeting Corresponding Standards</h3>&nbsp;Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines in the U.S. mandate rigorous tracking and documentation at every production stage to guarantee the traceability of each component. Meanwhile, Medical Device Regulation (MDR) standards in the EU emphasize consistent product safety across the device’s entire lifecycle, pushing manufacturers to follow stringent standards.Medical devices are divided into three classifications, by both FDA and MDR, based on associated risk, each with specific regulatory requirements:Class I Medical Devices: These low-risk devices pose minimal harm to users, often including items like bandages, gloves, and hand-held surgical instruments. Regulatory requirements are relatively basic, focusing mainly on general safety and quality.Class II Medical Devices: Moderate-risk devices, such as syringes, infusion pumps, and diagnostic equipment, require additional regulatory controls. These may involve special labeling, performance standards, and post-market supervision.Class III Medical Devices: High-risk devices, including pacemakers, defibrillators, and implants, require the highest level of regulatory supervision. This includes rigorous premarket approval, extensive testing, and clinical trials to confirm safety and effectiveness.For instance, a diagnostic device used for detecting infectious diseases needs each plastic component to withstand various sterilization processes without degrading or releasing harmful substances. Even minor contamination could compromise the device’s accuracy or pose risks to patients, underscoring the importance of these strict regulatory standards. Ensuring regulatory compliance is essential in medical injection molding, as incorrect categorization or non-compliance can lead to delays, increased costs, and a longer time to market.<h3 dir="ltr">2. Certifications: Guaranteeing Quality and Safety</h3>Certification is a standard, ensuring the products meet or exceed industry requirements. Key certifications in the medical industry include:ISO 13485: This certification ensures a quality management system is in place, maintaining consistency across production batches. For example, if producing IV systems or ventilators, ISO 13485 certification is critical.ISO 10993: For parts that come in direct contact with bodily fluids or tissues, ISO 10993 ensures biocompatibility. This certification is essential when manufacturing parts such as catheter tips or implantable device housings, where material safety directly impacts patient health.ISO 14644: This cleanroom certification is crucial for preventing contamination. A cleanroom-certified facility, for instance, can safely produce surgical device components that require a sterile environment, ensuring they meet hospital and surgical standards.<h3 dir="ltr">3. Material Selection: Biocompatibility and Durability</h3>Choosing materials for medical applications involves considerations beyond standard injection molding. Examples include:<ul><li dir="ltr">Polycarbonate (PC): Due to its strength and transparency, often used for housing devices requiring internal visibility, such as blood analyzers.</li><li dir="ltr">Polyethylene (PE):&nbsp;Known for chemical resistance and flexibility, PE is used in IV bags and tubing, ensuring durability and low moisture absorption.</li><li dir="ltr">Polypropylene (PP): With strong impact resistance and sterilization stability, PP is used in syringes and medical containers, offering long-term reliability.</li><li dir="ltr">Polystyrene (PS):&nbsp;Widely used for disposable labware, PS offers rigidity, transparency, and easy sterilization, making it suitable for laboratory applications.</li><li dir="ltr">Polyether Ether Ketone (PEEK):&nbsp;Widely used in implantable devices due to its strength, stability under sterilization, and biocompatibility.</li><li dir="ltr">Thermoplastic Elastomer (TPE):&nbsp;Its flexibility makes it suitable for soft-touch surgical instrument handles that withstand repeated sterilization.</li></ul>Every material choice has specific trade-offs. For instance, while PE and PP are cost-effective and chemically resistant, they might lack the strength needed for parts exposed to high-stress environments. Therefore, understanding these nuances helps in material selection, optimizing for both performance and cost.<a href="https://www.rpworld.com/en/resources/blog/what-materials-work-best-for-your-medical-device-development.html">&nbsp;Click Here</a> to explore more material choices.<h3 dir="ltr">4. Prototyping to Production: Ensuring a Smooth Transition</h3>Transitioning from prototypes to full-scale production isn’t always straightforward. During prototyping, designs may feature thinner walls or more complex geometries than standard injection molding processes can easily reproduce at scale. For example, a prototype with sharp corners that’s achievable created by the vacuum casting process, but requires design optimization, such as adding radii, and adding draft angle for efficient injection molding without sacrificing quality.When scaling up, an experienced injection molding partner with expertise and capabilities can help optimize these designs for manufacturability without compromising on quality. At RPWORLD, we assist clients in this crucial transition, helping optimize part design, select the most suitable materials, finishing options and more to support efficient and regulatory-compliant production.<h2 dir="ltr">How RPWORLD Injection Molding Accelerates Your Medical Development</h2>At RPWORLD, we integrate material expertise, one-stop manufacturing services, in-depth DFM analysis and ISO-certified process to help bring medical devices to market faster. Our services cover the entire lifecycle—from prototyping to mass production—tailoring to meet the unique needs of each medical device.Our Injection Molding Services Include:<ul><li dir="ltr">20+ years of experience in medical device injection molding, from prototyping to end-use production.</li><li dir="ltr">Mold flow analysis, and in-house tools design and fabrication.</li><li dir="ltr">Design for Manufacturing (DFM) guidance, including design optimization, material selection, finishing selection and more to avoid costly rework and save time up to 80%.</li><li dir="ltr">A wide variety of post-processing options to perfect your parts.</li><li dir="ltr">State-of-the-art quality inspection equipment and stringent quality control including real-time process monitoring to ensure consistency.</li></ul>

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

If you’re considering taking the next step in medical injection molding, this article will guide you through 4 key considerations in medical injection molding, from understanding device classifications and regulations to selecting suitable materials and preparing your design.

From Prototype to Production - 4 Critical Considerations for Safe and Compliant Medical Injection Molding

In this episode, we explore how AI co-pilots are equipping doctors with powerful tools to enhance decision-making and patient care and discuss how it could impact you - a potential patient - in the not distant future.

Podcast: Will AI Assistants Make Your Doctor Better?

This article was discussed in our <a href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/the.next.byte" rel="noopener noreferrer">Next Byte podcast</a>.&nbsp;<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/6b08d0cb-2606-44e8-be73-1dd17a7d2839?dark=false" class="fr-draggable" data-gtm-yt-inspected-24="true" data-lf-form-tracking-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-vimeo-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true"></iframe> The full article will continue below.<hr> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k7oJjazQAe4?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;rel=0&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.wevolver.com" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" data-gtm-yt-inspected-24="true" data-lf-form-tracking-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-vimeo-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true">&nbsp;</iframe>As we age, it becomes more difficult to remember where things are—whether it’s recalling where we left the keys or where we parked the car. This spatial memory deteriorates further with the onset of dementia, a condition that someone in the world develops every three seconds, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzMxMDI1MjMwNTYyLTI5YzA1YzhlLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">© Alzheimer’s Disease International<blockquote>We are addressing a serious concern for those affected by dementia.<footer>- Friedhelm Hummel</footer></blockquote>Researchers at two EPFL labs have joined forces to give a boost to spatial memory by creating a unique experimental setup that combines non-invasive deep-brain stimulation, virtual reality training, and fMRI imaging—all housed within Campus Biotech in Geneva. Published in Science Advances, the study demonstrates that targeted, painless electric impusles to the hippocampus and adjacent structures, a deep brain region implied in memory and spatial navigation, can improve the brain’s ability to recall locations and navigate more effectively.“By finding ways to improve spatial memory without surgery or medication, we are addressing a serious concern for a large and growing population: the elderly, as well as brain trauma patients and those affected by dementia,” says Friedhelm Hummel, head of the <a href="https://www.epfl.ch/labs/hummel-lab/">Hummel Lab</a>.The study is the result of a collaboration between the Hummel Lab and Olaf Blanke’s Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience (<a href="https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lnco/">LCNO</a>), both at EPFL’s Neuro X institute. By combining Hummel’s expertise in non-invasive brain stimulation with Blanke’s cognitive research of spatial navigation in virtual reality environments, the researchers developed a unique neuro-technological setup.<h2>A one-of-a-kind combination of neuro-technologies</h2>The experiment begins with researchers placing four harmless electrodes on the heads of healthy individuals to stimulate the hippocampus and adjacent structures. This non-invasive technique, <a href="https://actu.epfl.ch/news/non-invasive-deep-brain-stimulation-enhances-motor/">called transcranial temporal interference electric stimulation</a> (tTIS), sends targeted pulses without causing any discomfort for the participant.<blockquote>This leads us to believe that by stimulating the hippocampus, we temporarily increased brain plasticity.<footer>Elena Beanato</footer></blockquote>Next, volunteers are immersed in a virtual world using VR goggles. <a href="https://infoscience.epfl.ch/server/api/core/bitstreams/3f433490-92a4-461e-be04-fc02dea934b0/content">Building on previous research</a> by co-first-author Hyuk-June Moon, the scientists task the participants with navigating through a series of locations and remembering key landmarks. This immersive virtual setting allows researchers to precisely measure how well participants can recall and navigate spatial information whilst receiving tTIS.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzMxMDI1Mjc2NjI5LTkyYmZiNzhiLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Full experimental setup at Campus Biotech, combining non-invasive brain stimulation, virtual reality and fMRI. © 2024 EPFL“When stimulation was applied, we observed a clear improvement of the participants’ recall time—the time it took to start moving toward where they remembered the object to be,” says Elena Beanato, the other first author of the study. “This leads us to believe that by stimulating the hippocampus, we temporarily increased brain plasticity, which, when combined with training in a virtual environment, leads to better spatial navigation.”The entire experiment was conducted within an fMRI scanner. This provided researchers with real-time images of brain activity, allowing them to monitor how the hippocampus and surrounding regions responded to tTIS during the spatial navigation tasks. The fMRI data revealed changes in neural activity associated with the observed behavioral changes, specifically in the regions responsible for memory and navigation, giving the researchers deeper insight into how non-invasive stimulation modulates brain function.This integration of advanced technologies at EPFL's Neuro X Institute, makes Campus Biotech one of the few places where all three experimental techniques can be combined in a single study.<blockquote>“In the long term, we envision using this approach to develop targeted therapies for patients suffering from cognitive impairments.<footer>- Olaf Blanke</footer></blockquote>“The alliance of tTIS, virtual reality, and fMRI offers a highly controlled and innovative approach to studying the brain’s response to stimulation and its impact on cognitive functions,” adds Olaf Blanke. “In the long term, we envision using this approach to develop targeted therapies for patients suffering from cognitive impairments, offering a non-invasive way to enhance memory and spatial abilities.”<hr>ReferencesBeanato, E., Moon, H.-J., Windel, F., Vassiliadis, P., Wessel, M. J., Popa, T., Menoud, P., Neufeld, E., De Falco, E., Gauthier, B., Steiner, M., Blanke, O., &amp; Hummel, F. C. (2024). Noninvasive modulation of the hippocampal-entorhinal complex during spatial navigation in humans. Science Advances. DOI: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ado4103" target="_blank" rel="noopener">10.1126/sciadv.ado4103</a>

EPFL researchers have combined virtual reality, non-invasive brain stimulation and advanced brain imaging techniques to improve spatial navigation in healthy participants. The study is a first step in addressing dementia in an aging population without medication or surgery.

Neurotechnology boosts memory without surgery

<section id="isPasted">Imagine you have a virtual copy of your own body. This digital twin, an accurate computer model, can help doctors better understand your health, personalize treatments, and intervene earlier to prevent more significant problems. What sounds like science fiction now is becoming more and more of a reality, and in the (distant) future, it could revolutionize healthcare.Source: <a href="https://www.catharinaziekenhuis.nl/actueel/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">Catharina Ziekenhuis Eindhoven</a> / Geert Piek</section><section tabindex="-1">A digital twin is actually a kind of digital version of yourself, based on data from your body, but also on information from many other people. This technology is already being used in sectors such as industry and urban planning, where these virtual copies can be used to predict how machines or traffic systems will behave, for example.Now, this technique is also increasingly finding its way into healthcare.<h2 id="isPasted">What does this mean for the patient of the future?</h2>Lukas Dekker, cardiologist-electrophysiologist at the Catharina Hospital and professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), explains: “In the future, we will be able to provide tailor-made care with the help of a digital twin.”“This means that we are better able to determine the best treatment for each patient, instead of giving everyone the same standard of care. This not only makes healthcare more personalized but also more efficient and affordable. We move away from the idea of&nbsp;one size fits all.”A digital twin is not a simple model that doctors use to try out surgeries in advance but a smart collection of data that uses real-time information to simulate and predict your health. “We combine medical scans, data on how your body moves and how it responds to treatments. This allows us to calculate, for example, how your heart functions,” says Dekker.<h3>Saving lives</h3>This opens the door to new possibilities. Let's say you've had a heart attack. With a digital twin, doctors would be able to predict who has an increased risk of cardiac arrhythmias after such an attack. That can save lives.Carlijn Buck, PhD candidate in cardiovascular biomechanics, is working on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.catharinaziekenhuis.nl/kan-data-voorspellen-wie-na-een-infarct-hartritmestoornissen-ontwikkelt/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">the development of digital twins of heart patients within the COMBAT-VT project</a>. “It's still a long way off to make a complete digital copy of the body, but the first versions of digital twins of the heart have already been created,” she says. “The next step is for such a model to adapt as new data comes in, and then quickly predict whether something will go wrong.”This means that doctors can predict your health better and better without you having to go to the hospital constantly. “In the future, more and more devices you wear – such as smart watches or heart monitors – will pass on data to your doctor.”“They can then monitor your health remotely and intervene if necessary,” explains Dekker. “When something is measured, you don't just want the data in question to be analyzed, but also to be analyzed in a certain context. After all, one person differs significantly from another, whether that is due to age, weight, or medical history.”<h3 id="isPasted">No unnecessary burden on healthcare</h3>One of the most significant advantages of a digital twin is that it helps doctors estimate when you need what type of medical care. “Some patients may need to be checked more quickly than others. With a digital twin, we can better assess this in the future and offer tailored care,” says Dekker.This also means that the healthcare system is not unnecessarily burdened. “Not every patient needs a complicated model,” Buck explains. “For some patients, a simple risk model is sufficient, based on data such as age and weight. But if there is a high risk, we can create a more detailed model to get a better understanding.”She explains that this requires more complicated data, such as an MRI scan of the heart. This means more impact for the patient, a more labor-intensive job for the medical engineer who assembles the twin, and higher healthcare costs. “So if you don't need such a detailed model, you shouldn't do it.”<h3>Human side remains crucial</h3>Creating&nbsp;a digital twin is an intensive process in which technicians and doctors work closely together. The technician builds the twins while the doctor determines how they will be used in practice. “For example, in the case&nbsp;<a href="https://www.catharinaziekenhuis.nl/behandelingen/ablatie/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">of ablation</a>, a procedure to treat cardiac arrhythmias, the model could help determine when and how the heart can best be treated,” says Buck.But, she emphasizes, a digital twin does not replace the doctor. “The model doesn't tell you how you feel or how you view surgery. It can't take the context into account; it's only useful for what it's made for. It is, therefore, a tool for the doctor to provide the best possible care. The human side and the overall context remain crucial, and that’s why we will still need a doctor.”<h3>Enormous possibilities</h3>Although the technology is still in the early stages of development, the possibilities of digital twins are enormous. The combination of data, technology and medical expertise ensures that we can provide more and more tailor-made care in the future.The COMBAT-VT project falls under the umbrella of the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.tue.nl/en/research/research-groups/eaisi/eaisi-business-operations/eindhoven-medtech-innovation-center/" target="_blank">Eindhoven MedTech Innovation Center (e/MTIC),</a> a large regional partnership in the field of medical technology between TU/e, Philips, and the Catharina Hospital, Maxima Medical Center, and Kempenhaeghe. A crucial collaboration for this research is combining input from healthcare with technological developments. </section>

Lukas Dekker and Carlijn Buck in consultation with their digital twin. Photo: Catharina Ziekenhuis Eindhoven

Researchers Lukas Dekker and Carlijn Buck of TU/e and the Catharina Hospital are investigating how they can provide better-tailored care to heart patients through smart modeling, thanks to a digital twin of each patient.

Digital twins will help to tailor healthcare more in the future

Thinking outside the box, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Aarhus University researchers have now engineered “MouthIO,” a dental brace that can be fabricated with sensors and feedback components to capture in-mouth interactions and data. This interactive wearable could eventually assist dentists and other doctors with collecting health data and help motor-impaired individuals interact with a phone, computer, or fitness tracker using their mouths.Resembling an electronic retainer, MouthIO is a see-through brace that fits the specifications of your upper or lower set of teeth from a scan. The researchers created a plugin for the modeling software Blender to help users tailor the device to fit a dental scan, where you can then 3D print your design in dental resin. This computer-aided design tool allows users to digitally customize a panel (called PCB housing) on the side to integrate electronic components like batteries, sensors (including detectors for temperature and acceleration, as well as tongue-touch sensors), and actuators (like vibration motors and LEDs for feedback). You can also place small electronics outside of the PCB housing on individual teeth.<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PsDgvZ_6vT4?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.wevolver.com" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" data-lf-form-tracking-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-vimeo-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true"></iframe><h2 dir="ltr" id="isPasted">The active mouth</h2>“The mouth is a really interesting place for an interactive wearable and can open up many opportunities, but has remained largely unexplored due to its complexity,” says senior author Michael Wessely, a former CSAIL postdoc and senior author on a&nbsp;<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3654777.3676443">paper about MouthIO</a> who is now an assistant professor at Aarhus University. “This compact, humid environment has elaborate geometries, making it hard to build a wearable interface to place inside. With MouthIO, though, we’ve developed a new kind of device that’s comfortable, safe, and almost invisible to others. Dentists and other doctors are eager about MouthIO for its potential to provide new health insights, tracking things like teeth grinding and potentially bacteria in your saliva.” The excitement for MouthIO’s potential in health monitoring stems from initial experiments. The team found that their device could track bruxism (the habit of grinding teeth) by embedding an accelerometer within the brace to track jaw movements. When attached to the lower set of teeth, MouthIO detected when users grind and bite, with the data charted to show how often users did each. Wessely and his colleagues’ customizable brace could one day help users with motor impairments, too. The team connected small touchpads to MouthIO, helping detect when a user’s tongue taps their teeth. These interactions could be sent via Bluetooth to scroll across a webpage, for example, allowing the tongue to act as a “third hand” to open up a new avenue for hands-free interaction."MouthIO is a great example how miniature electronics now allow us to integrate sensing into a broad range of everyday interactions,” says study co-author Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering and leader of the HCI Engineering Group at CSAIL. “I'm especially excited about the potential to help improve accessibility and track potential health issues among users."<h2 dir="ltr">Molding and making MouthIO</h2>To get a 3D model of your teeth, you can first create a physical impression and fill it with plaster. You can then scan your mold with a mobile app like Polycam and upload that to Blender. Using the researchers’ plugin within this program, you can clean up your dental scan to outline a precise brace design. Finally, you 3D print your digital creation in clear dental resin, where the electronic components can then be soldered on. Users can create a standard brace that covers their teeth, or opt for an “open-bite” design within their Blender plugin. The latter fits more like open-finger gloves, exposing the tips of your teeth, which helps users avoid lisping and talk naturally.This “do it yourself” method costs roughly $15 to produce and takes two hours to be 3D-printed. MouthIO can also be fabricated with a more expensive, professional-level teeth scanner similar to what dentists and orthodontists use, which is faster and less labor-intensive.Compared to its closed counterpart, which fully covers your teeth, the researchers view the open-bite design as a more comfortable option. The team preferred to use it for beverage monitoring experiments, where they fabricated a brace capable of alerting users when a drink was too hot. This iteration of MouthIO had a temperature sensor and a monitor embedded within the PCB housing that vibrated when a drink exceeded 65 degrees Celsius (or 149 degrees Fahrenheit). This could help individuals with mouth numbness better understand what they’re consuming. In a user study, participants also preferred the open-bite version of MouthIO. “We found that our device could be suitable for everyday use in the future,” says study lead author and Aarhus University PhD student Yijing Jiang. “Since the tongue can touch the front teeth in our open-bite design, users don’t have a lisp. This made users feel more comfortable wearing the device during extended periods with breaks, similar to how people use retainers.” The team’s initial findings indicate that MouthIO is a cost-effective, accessible, and customizable interface, and the team is working on a more long-term study to evaluate its viability further. They’re looking to improve its design, including experimenting with more flexible materials, and placing it in other parts of the mouth, like the cheek and the palate. Among these ideas, the researchers have already prototyped two new designs for MouthIO: a single-sided brace for even higher comfort when wearing MouthIO while also being fully invisible to others, and another fully capable of wireless charging and communication. Jiang, Mueller, and Wessely’s co-authors include PhD student Julia Kleinau, master’s student Till Max Eckroth, and associate professor Eve Hoggan, all of Aarhus University. Their work was supported by a Novo Nordisk Foundation grant and was presented at ACM’s Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

When you think about hands-free devices, you might picture Alexa and other voice-activated in-home assistants, Bluetooth earpieces, or asking Siri to make a phone call in your car. You might not imagine using your mouth to communicate with other devices like a computer or a phone remotely. 

Interactive mouthpiece opens new opportunities for health data, assistive technology, and hands-free interactions

<section id="isPasted">In the 2010s, at-home 3D printing become a widespread craze but as years passed the buzz has quieted. While some of the media excitement may have tempered, 3D printing applications continued to flourish in more technical industries, and the technology has become an intrinsic part of manufacturing and producing products from hearing aids, dentistry parts or surgical instruments and inhalers. As part of 3D printing’s resurgence, it is now transforming the life sciences industry and revolutionizing Medtech in unexpected ways.</section><section><h2>Using 3D Printed Microneedles to Tackle Skin Cancer</h2>Our customer <a href="https://www.imcomet.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">IMcoMET Medtech</a> is a biotech startup in the field of skin cancer treatment. Immunotherapy is now turning to the use of micro-scale tools to change the way we treat skin cancer, &nbsp;IMcoMET MedTech has developed technology like the <a href="https://bmf3d.com/resource/skin-cancer-treatment-device-manufactured-with-micro-3d-printing/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">microneedle-Duo (M-Duo)</a> which allows the microenvironment of the tumor and all of its components to be physically removed, to then be replaced with healthy tissue.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1730078578343-imcomet-image.jpg" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"><section id="isPasted">This small scale of design and alternative approach to tumor aspiration wouldn’t be possible without 3D printing technology from Boston Micro Fabrication, which printed the parts needed to assemble the device on its open-source, micro 3D printing platform. The technology used 3D printed components such as the caps/lid that hold the needles in place. BMF was able to print these high-precision pieces, bridging the gap between classic technology (SLA 3D and nano 3D printing). BMF is able to manufacture these parts due to the high-precision capabilities of its devices – with 100µm channels and spacing requirements of the part down to 20-40 µm.</section><section><h2>Shaping COVID-19 Testing with High-Resolution Molding</h2>Researchers at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.berkeley.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">UC Berkeley</a> were looking for an alternative method to produce molds for multiplex&nbsp;<a href="https://bmf3d.com/resource/3d-printing-molds-uc-berkeley/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">microfluidic</a> devices that can be used in the fight against COVID-19. These devices are equipped with a sensor and can be used to perform traditional antibody testing for patients who are infected. As a means to reduce the spread of viruses, there is a pressing need to detect infection at a very early stage through viral RNA analysis.Christos Adamopoulos, PhD Candidate and Asmaysinh Gharia, Researcher at UC Berkeley were very impressed with the ultra-high resolution that BMF’s technology can achieve. The accuracy and precision of these 3D printed molds is especially important as the microfluidic multiplex devices currently use 100µm channels and they wanted to make channels on an even smaller scale with a higher density.After running through tests with BMF on their 10-micron resolution <a href="https://bmf3d.com/10%CE%BCm-series-printers/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">microArch S140 3D</a> printer, they discovered it was possible to produce features and channels down to 50µm and still have the layers align accurately. They can now fit eight channels instead of five onto the same footprint and can scale up device complexity without increasing the production scale.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1730078636789-1730078636789.png" class="fr-fic fr-dib"><h2 id="isPasted">Increasing High Quality Precision in Medtech</h2>Medical devices place extremely high demands on the reliability of their components. &nbsp;With applications including surgical power tools, ventilators, and heart pumps, precision bearings are among the critical components on which the safety of treated patients often directly depends. The need for precision and selection fitting components for the device is of the utmost importance.<a href="https://www.rndrmedical.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RNDR Medical</a> is a team of talented and experienced medical device engineers, designers, technicians and executives focused on the advancement of medical technologies. In their recent partnership with BMF, they were able to launch a <a href="https://bmf3d.com/resource/micro-3d-printing-for-disposable-medical-devices/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">novel single-use scope for endourology</a> that is utilized for direct visualization and navigation to enable diagnosis and treatment of urinary tract disorders, such as kidney stones and urothelial carcinoma, as well as pyeloscopy procedures enabling therapeutic access to the renal pelvis and kidneys.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1730078665670-disposable-tip-rndr-1.png" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"><section id="isPasted">Anthony Appling, Principal, Co-owner, and Keith Wells, Design Engineering Lead were seeking a manufacturing solution since the device requires a high degree of precision while being sealed to prevent fluid exposure. While searching for a solution to navigate the long and expensive wait times of micro molding, they came across Boston Micro Fabrication’s Projection Micro Stereolithography (PµSL) micro 3D printing technology.By partnering with BMF, the RNDR team was able to cut production time in half. BMF’s microscale 3D printers also enabled the company’s medical device engineers to evaluate and iterate designs in a matter of days and weeks vs months. As RNDR Medical can attest, BMF 3D printers are well-suited for visualization systems, therapy and diagnostic catheters, and delivery systems across medical device markets.</section><section><h2>Enhanced efficiency in Medtech devices</h2>According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, annual US healthcare spending on medical devices is projected to reach around $300 billion to $400 billion — 5-6% of $6.8 trillion in total healthcare spend — by 2030. &nbsp;3D printing is already becoming a critical player in the production and manufacturing process as companies and research institutes continue to utilize its applications.Last year, the <a href="https://www.unict.it/en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">University of Catania</a> designed <a href="https://bmf3d.com/resource/micro-3d-printing-for-micro-optofluidics/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">micro-optofluidic devices</a> suitable for an enhanced optical investigation device. Lorena Saitta, PhD in the Polymers and Composites was looking for a one-step manufacturing process that could guarantee optical transparency and tailored surface chemistry without the need for further assembly. The device also needed appropriate surface roughness to avoid flow instability and minimize the risk of fluid leakage at assembly points.Saitta turned to 3D printing to manufacture the micro-optofluidic device in one piece. Using the <a href="https://bmf3d.com/10%CE%BCm-series-printers/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">microArch S140,</a> team was able to print the device with integrated inlets, outlets, and insertions for micro-optical fibers. The microArch S140 was also able to manufacture the micro-optofluidic device in one piece, eliminating concerns over fluid leakage. Projection Micro Stereolithography has opened new frontiers in the manufacturing of micro-optofluidic devices” says Lorena Saitta, PhD, University of Catania.</section><section><h2>Expanding MedTech Applications</h2>Use cases are increasingly proving that 3D printing is growing to be more intertwined with the advancement of technology in healthcare and the life sciences. Beyond applications in use today, BMF is continuing to innovate through its partnership with the University of Nottingham. The Centre for Additive Manufacturing, a multidisciplinary research group at The University of Nottingham, is developing a toolkit that will act as an instruction manual to improve the pathway from research all the way through to development and clinical adoption; identifying how medical technology companies can develop personalized and tailored medical devices. This project aims to help to unlock a bottleneck that prevents the bringing of new innovative engineering to the NHS.Whether it’s by creating micro-scale tools that deliver immunotherapy and have the potential to change the way we treat skin cancer, to producing high accuracy and precision printing molds for early detection COVID-19 tests or looking away from traditional manufacturing to additive manufacturing to combat extended production times, micro 3D printing is pushing the boundaries of innovation. The benefit of utilizing 3D continues to be recognized by companies as a creative, high-quality solution and will continue to play a critical role in new innovations to come.</section></section></section>

3D printing applications continued to flourish in more technical industries, and the technology has become an intrinsic part of manufacturing and producing products from hearing aids, dentistry parts or surgical instruments and inhalers.

The top ways high precision 3D printing is changing the medical and life sciences landscape

Co-founder of TU/e spin-off Microsure, microsurgeon Tom van Mulken, defended his PhD thesis at Maastricht University on October 18th. He studied the safety and capabilities of a surgical support robot for microsurgical procedures.

Thanks to a newly developed surgical robot, reconstructive surgery can be performed more safely and accurately in the future. This is also expected to lead to fewer complications and faster patient recovery.

Precision robot transforms reconstructive microsurgery

Two new kinds of on-skin electronics allow users to build and customize them directly on the body – with potential applications in biometric sensing, medical monitoring, interactive prosthetic makeup and more.<a href="https://www.hybridbody.human.cornell.edu/#/skinlink/">SkinLink</a>, developed by the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hybridbody.human.cornell.edu/">Hybrid Body Lab</a> led by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.human.cornell.edu/people/hk932">Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao</a>, assistant professor of human centered design in the College of Human Ecology, is an on-skin electronic interface that can be fabricated right on the body, providing flexibility in design depending on the intended use. And&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hybridbody.human.cornell.edu/#/ecskin/">ECSkin</a> is an electrochromic display interface that also can be fabricated in situ, and features modular design through tiles that can be arranged as desired.Some of the potential applications for SkinLink include vital-sign and posture monitoring, proximity sensing and body art.“Both of these projects are modular prototyping toolkits, to enable much more intricate on-skin circuitry prototyping,” Kao said. “And users are able to build the circuitry directly on the skin surface.”Doctoral student and lab member Pin-Sung Ku is lead author of “<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3596241">SkinLink:&nbsp;On-body Construction and Prototyping of Reconfigurable Epidermal Interfaces</a>,” which was presented in early October at UbiComp/ISWC ’24, the Association for Computing Machinery’s international joint conference on pervasive and ubiquitous computing.The work earned a Distinguished Paper Award from the journal, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, where it was originally published in June 2023.<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3659613">ECSkin: Tessellating Electrochromic Films for Reconfigurable On-skin Displays</a>, which published May 15, 2024, in the same journal and for which Ku is also lead author, was also presented at the conference. Kao is senior author for both papers.SkinLink represents a step forward from&nbsp;<a href="https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2022/11/skinkit-offers-versatile-wearable-skin-computing">SkinKit, which the lab developed</a> and presented at UbiComp in 2021. The earlier iteration featured slim and flexible printed circuit boards in temporary tattoo form, but the boards had predefined behaviors and larger surface areas, making customizability a challenge.“There were several issues we didn’t address in SkinKit, such as how to allow users to program the modules the way they want to,” Ku said. “For SkinKit, everything was pre-programmed; users had to attach things in a certain order. With SkinLink, there is more customizability of the functions they like.”With SkinKit, for example, the circuitry had to be built before applying it to the body; with SkinLink, users can put one module on the body, then another, for more customizability.&nbsp;The SkinLink toolkit consists of functional circuit modules, made of flexible printed circuit boards, and flexible, custom-designed wiring (called trace modules, or traces) that connect the sensor and actuator modules to the microcontroller board.That’s a key difference from SkinKit: Smaller circuit boards are connect via flexible wiring, allowing for greater freedom of motion without sacrificing connectivity.&nbsp; “The circuit boards are somewhat rigid,” Ku said, “but we created the traces to be elastic, stretchable and flexible, so as not to hinder body movement.”The on-body fabrication process starts with selecting and programming the circuit board and trace modules. The microcontroller board can be repeatedly programmed during this step, to fine-tune the circuit functions. The boards can be temporarily placed on the body and customized, before final placement.The researchers conducted A/B testing of SkinLink, comparing its usability with SkinKit in a 14-person study, and found that SkinLink enables a more flexible wiring process than SkinKit, along with unrestricted circuit arrangement and superior wearability. Compared to the SkinKit, the SkinLink interface has a much smaller footprint, better stretchability, easier fabricating and more seamless wear.SkinKit, Kao said, offered a “low floor” – a term coined by computer scientist Ben Shneiderman, meaning that people with little or no experience can quickly get started designing and prototyping wearable tech. SkinLink takes it a couple of steps further, she said.“Another goal is what we call ‘high ceilings and wide walls,’” she said. “High ceilings means increasing the complexity of the prototypes; wide walls refers to the vast array of things that could be designed. That’s what I think SkinLink really does.”Kao said she sees both SkinLink and ECSkin as “enabling technologies,” with a variety of potential uses. Some of the studies with SkinLink involved artists, wearable tech researchers, and psychology researchers for physiology sensing; she also envisions applications beyond humans.&nbsp;“Being able to use this as a functional technology for physiological sensing or artistic practice is one application,” she said. “Our work has focused on skin interfaces for humans, but I think there could also be potential for designing ‘skin’ interfaces for other living beings, such as animals, and sensing for agricultural purposes, even on plants. We are interested in bringing SkinLink to broader disciplines to support on-skin prototyping.”

An ECSkin on-body display, composed of modular electrochromic films, is flexible and soft, and easily conforms to complex body parts such as the wrist. Hybrid Body Lab/Provided

Two new kinds of on-skin electronics allow users to build and customize them directly on the body – with potential applications in biometric sensing, medical monitoring, interactive prosthetic makeup and more.

On-body electronics can monitor health, support creative expression

This article was discussed in our <a href="https://www.wevolver.com/profile/the.next.byte" rel="noopener noreferrer">Next Byte podcast</a>.&nbsp;<iframe height="200px" width="100%" frameborder="no" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/35ecb899-3a2c-45e8-9d17-7a8c87d944ba?dark=false" class="fr-draggable" data-lf-form-tracking-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-vimeo-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true"></iframe> The full article will continue below.<hr>Most doctors go into medicine because they want to help patients. But today’s health care system requires that doctors spend hours each day on other work — searching through electronic health records (EHRs), writing documentation, coding and billing, prior authorization, and utilization management — often surpassing the time they spend caring for patients. The situation leads to physician burnout, administrative inefficiencies, and worse overall care for patients.Ambience Healthcare is working to change that with an AI-powered platform that automates routine&nbsp;tasks for clinicians before, during, and after patient visits."We build co-pilots to give clinicians AI superpowers," says Ambience CEO Mike Ng MBA ’16, who co-founded the company with Nikhil Buduma ’17. "Our platform is embedded directly into&nbsp;EHRs to free up clinicians to&nbsp;focus on what matters most, which is providing the best possible patient care."Ambience’s suite of products handles pre-charting and real-time AI scribing, and assists with navigating the thousands of rules to select the right insurance billing codes. The platform can also send after-visit summaries to patients and their families in different languages to keep everyone informed and on the same page.Ambience is already being used across roughly 40 large institutions such as UCSF Health, the Memorial Hermann Health System, St. Luke’s Health System, John Muir Health, and more.&nbsp;Clinicians leverage Ambience in dozens of languages and more than&nbsp;100 specialties and subspecialties, in settings&nbsp;like the emergency department, hospital inpatient settings,&nbsp;and the oncology ward.The founders say clinicians using Ambience save two to three hours per day on documentation,&nbsp;report lower levels of burnout, and develop higher-quality relationships with their patients.<h2>From problem to product to platform</h2>Ng worked in finance until getting an up-close look at the health care system after he fractured his back in 2012. He was initially misdiagnosed and put on the wrong care plan, but he learned a lot about the U.S. health system in the process, including how the majority of clinicians’ days are spent documenting visits, selecting billing codes, and completing other administrative tasks. The average clinician only spends 27 percent of their time on direct patient care.In 2014, Ng decided to enter the MIT Sloan School of Management. During his first week, he attended the “t=0” celebration of entrepreneurship hosted by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, where he met Buduma.&nbsp;The pair became fast friends, and they ended up taking classes together including 15.378 (Building an Entrepreneurial Venture) and 15.392 (Scaling Entrepreneurial Ventures).“MIT was an incredible training ground to evaluate what makes a great company and learn the foundations of building a successful company,” Ng says.Buduma had gone through his own journey to discover problems with the health care system. After immigrating to the U.S. from India as a child and battling persistent health issues, he had watched his parents struggle to navigate the U.S. medical&nbsp;system. While completing his bachelor’s degree at MIT, he was also steeped in the AI research community and wrote an early textbook on modern AI and deep learning.In 2016, Ng and Buduma&nbsp;founded&nbsp;their first company in San Francisco — Remedy Health — which operated its own AI-powered health care platform. In the process of hiring clinicians, taking care of patients, and implementing technology themselves, they developed an even deeper appreciation for the challenges that health care organizations face.During that time, they also got an inside look at advances in AI. Google’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, a major investor in Remedy and now in Ambience, led a research group inside of Google Brain to invent the transformer architecture. Ng and Buduma say they were among the first to put transformers into production to support their own clinicians at Remedy. Subsequently, several of their friends and housemates went on to start the large language model group within OpenAI. Their friends’ work formed the research foundations that ultimately led to ChatGPT. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;“It was very clear that we were at this inflection point where we were going to have this class of general-purpose models that were going to get exponentially better,” Buduma says. “But I think we also noticed a big gap between those general-purpose models versus what actually would be robust enough to work in a clinic. Mike and I decided in 2020 that there should be a team that specifically focused on fine-tuning these models for health&nbsp;care and medicine.”The founders started Ambience by building an AI-powered scribe that works on phones and laptops to record the details of doctor-patient visits in a HIPAA-compliant system that preserves patient privacy. They quickly saw that the models needed to be fine-tuned for each area&nbsp;of medicine, and they slowly expanded specialty coverage one by one in a multiyear process.The founders also realized their scribes needed to fit within back-office operations like insurance coding and billing.“Documentation isn’t just for the clinician, it's also for the revenue cycle team,” Buduma says. “We had to go back and rewrite all of our algorithms to be coding-aware. There are literally tens of thousands of coding rules that change every year and differ by specialty and contract type.”From there, the founders built out models for clinicians to make referrals and to send comprehensive summaries of visits to patients.“In most care settings before Ambience, when a patient and their family left the clinic, whatever the patient and their family wrote down was what they remembered from the visit,” Buduma says. “That’s one of the features that physicians love most, because they are trying to create the best experience for patients and their families. By the time that patient is in the parking lot, they already have a really robust, high-quality summary of exactly what you talked about and all the shared decision-making around your visit in their portal.”<h2>Democratizing health care</h2>By improving physician productivity, the founders believe they’re helping the health care&nbsp;system manage a chronic shortage of clinicians that’s expected to grow in coming years.“In health care, access is still a huge problem,” Ng says. “Rural Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of preventable hospitalization, and half of that is attributed to a lack of access to specialty care.”With Ambience already helping health systems manage razor-thin margins by streamlining administrative tasks,&nbsp;the founders have a longer-term vision to help&nbsp;increase access to the best clinical information across the country.“There’s a really exciting opportunity to make expertise at some of the major academic medical centers more democratized across the U.S.,” Ng says. “Right now, there’s just not enough specialists in the U.S. to support our rural populations. We hope to help scale the knowledge of the leading specialists in the country through an AI infrastructure layer, especially as these models become more clinically intelligent.”

Ambience is being used across roughly 40 health systems in the U.S. by clinicians in over 100 subspecialties. Image: iStock

Alumni-founded Ambience Healthcare automates routine tasks for clinicians before, during, and after patient visits.

Equipping doctors with AI co-pilots

Neural spheroids — 3D clusters of brain cells — are emerging as essential tools for understanding neural networks and studying neurological diseases in the lab. EPFL’s e-Flower, a flower-shaped 3D microelectrode array (MEA), allows researchers to monitor the electrical activity of these spheroids in a way that was previously impossible. This breakthrough, <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp8054" target="_blank" rel="noopener">published in Science Advances</a>, lays the groundwork for more sophisticated research on brain organoids, which are complex, miniaturized models of brain tissues.<blockquote>Our flexible technology makes it possible to get accurate recordings without damaging the 3D neural models.<footer>Stéphanie P. Lacour</footer></blockquote>“The e-Flower lets us record neural activity from much more of the surface of neural spheroids in real-time — something that wasn’t possible with earlier tools. Our flexible technology makes it possible to get accurate recordings without damaging the 3D neural models, giving us a better understanding of how their complex circuits work,” says Stéphanie P. Lacour, lead author of the paper and head of the Laboratory for Soft Bioelectronic Interfaces (<a href="https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lsbi/">LSBI</a>) at the Neuro X Institute.<h2>Why neural spheroids?</h2>“We focused on neural spheroids for this study because they provide a straightforward and accessible model,” says Eleonora Martinelli, one of the lead researchers on the project.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1729211190818-9f9374f8.jpg" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Eleonora Martinelli says the goal is to apply the e-Flower to brain organoids. © 2024 EPFL / Alain HerzogNeural spheroids are three-dimensional clusters of neurons that replicate some of the key functions of brain tissue. They are simpler than organoids, which contain multiple cell types and more closely mimic the brain. The LSBI team at Campus Biotech worked in collaboration with Luc Stoppini and Adrien Roux at the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hesge.ch/hepia/en/group/bioengineering" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tissue Engineering Laboratory</a> (HEPIA-HESGE), researchers with long-standing experience with neural spheroids electrophysiology.“Spheroids are relatively easy to produce and manipulate in the lab, which makes them ideal for early-stage testing,” Martinelli continues. “However, our goal is to eventually apply the e-Flower to brain organoids, which more accurately model brain development and disorders.”“Organoids represent an exciting interface both for neuroscience research and next-generation neurotechnology,” says Stéphanie Lacour. “They bridge the gap between simplified in vitro models and the complexities of the human brain. Our work with the e-Flower is a critical step toward being able to explore these 3D models.”<h2>The serendipity behind the innovation</h2><blockquote>What was originally a problem for one project became the solution for another.<footer>Eleonora Martinelli</footer></blockquote>Interestingly, the e-Flower was born out of an unexpected discovery. Outman Akouissi, a collaborator on the project, encountered a challenge while working on soft implants for peripheral nerves: the hydrogels he used caused his devices to curl unpredictably when exposed to water. What started as a frustration turned into a breakthrough when Akouissi and Martinelli realized this curling mechanism could be harnessed for a completely different application — wrapping around neural spheroids.“This was a perfect example of how serendipity can lead to innovation,” says Martinelli. “What was originally a problem for one project became the solution for another.”<h2>A new approach to neural electrophysiology</h2>The device consists of four flexible petals equipped with platinum electrodes, which curl around the spheroid when exposed to the liquid that supports the cell structure. This actuation is driven by the swelling of a soft hydrogel, making the device both gentle on the tissue and easy to use.Designed to be compatible with existing electrophysiological systems, the e-Flower offers a plug-and-play solution for researchers, avoiding the need for complex external actuators or harmful solvents.Once the technology is applied to organoids, the ability to record electrical activity from all sides will provide a much more comprehensive understanding of brain processes. Researchers hope this will lead to new insights into neurodevelopment, brain injury recovery, and neurological diseases.<hr>ReferencesMartinelli, E., Akouissi, O., Liebi, L., Furfaro, I., Maulà, D., Savoia, N., Remy, A., Nikles, L., Roux, A., Stoppini, L., Lacour, S.P. "The e-Flower: A Hydrogel-Actuated 3D MEA for Brain Spheroid Electrophysiology." Science Advances, 2023. DOI:<a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp8054" target="_blank" rel="noopener">10.1126/sciadv.adp8054</a>

EPFL researchers have developed a novel neural recording device called the "e-Flower" that gently wraps organoids in soft petals.

e-Flower records neuronal activity with electronic petals

Surgical instruments, sponges, or other objects that are inadvertently left inside a patient's body following a procedure are referred to as retained surgical bodies. Despite stringent safety protocols and advancements in surgical practices, these incidents can still occur, posing serious risks to patient health and safety.<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1k0pfPwzTw4?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https://www.wevolver.com" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" data-lf-form-tracking-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-yt-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true" data-lf-vimeo-playback-inspected-kn9eq4roawkarlvp="true">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</iframe>Several factors contribute to the occurrence of retained surgical bodies. One common factor is the hectic nature of surgical environments, where numerous instruments and items are used during procedures. High-stress situations, time pressure, and distractions can lead to oversight, causing medical teams to unintentionally leave objects inside patients. Additionally, during complex surgeries or emergency situations, maintaining an accurate count of surgical instruments and items may prove challenging, increasing the likelihood of retention.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1739291834573-1.png" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"><iframe width="540" height="375" src="https://c8056756.sibforms.com/serve/MUIFAMXbzNzNSyMeYsMybLI-54_IoJGam-Ow5Rafkxl9--KaPuomcDrglOqbvtjakyD2bXs-rydfKR0xW02WlzYWFyZRaIxw6KHBvpL-qZHhww0M5OsSm7r0LrA90cGrXNvcfbrPS_J7fBOttsX1qray3uaPjy5ps39DeMLyY0mPjNw-CYJyrnWFs9IZWDxJfo_GrULjpgCTCRnD" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" allowfullscreen="" style="display: block;margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;max-width: 100%;" class="fr-draggable">&nbsp;</iframe>There are a number of practices that are intended to prevent the occurrence of retained surgical bodies. The most fundamental measure is the implementation of standardized counting procedures before, during, and after surgery. Surgical teams meticulously count and document all instruments and items used, cross-verifying with a designated checklist. The use of radio frequency identification technology and barcoding systems on surgical instruments has also been introduced to enhance tracking and minimize human error.Unfortunately, errors do still occur. And those errors can be very costly — complications arising from retained surgical bodies can be severe and potentially life-threatening. Patients may experience localized pain, infection, inflammation, and, in some cases, damage to surrounding organs or tissues. The foreign object can lead to the formation of abscesses or contribute to the development of systemic infections. In extreme cases, retained surgical bodies may necessitate additional surgeries to remove the object, which poses further risks and complications.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzI4ODkxMzgzODQ2LWltYWdlMy5wbmciLCJlZGl0cyI6eyJyZXNpemUiOnsid2lkdGgiOjk1MCwiZml0IjoiY292ZXIifX19" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">AI surgical tool tracker: the finished device<h3 id="isPasted">Building a smart solution</h3>In an effort to remove human error from the equation, Eivind Holt has developed an automated system that can objectively assess if the entire surgical inventory has been accounted for at the end of a procedure. This system never suffers from stress in emergency situations, and never gets distracted from the task at hand, which could make it the ideal solution to the problem. The initial prototype has been implemented as a wearable device that can recognize a variety of surgical instruments as it sees them so that medical professionals can later ensure that they are all accounted for.Building a device like this can quickly get complicated. To be practical, a wearable device must be small and capable of operating for long periods of time on battery power. Designing an object detection algorithm that can efficiently run on such a tiny hardware platform also presents a number of issues, as computer vision-related tasks are often very resource-intensive. Moreover, for a typical person, collecting enough images of surgical instruments to train the object detection model can be challenging.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzI4ODkxNDA1MTY5LWltYWdlMi5wbmciLCJlZGl0cyI6eyJyZXNpemUiOnsid2lkdGgiOjk1MCwiZml0IjoiY292ZXIifX19" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Surgical instruments used to collect the initial training dataset<h3 id="isPasted">Choosing hardware</h3>Holt was able to work through these problems by carefully selecting a set of tools that can address each of the challenges. On the hardware front, an Arduino Nicla Vision was chosen. At just 22.86 mm x 22.86 mm, it can easily clip on a shirt without getting in the way. With its built-in image sensor and an Arm Cortex M7 processor with 1 MB of RAM, it has the power to run some fairly sophisticated algorithms. Object detection algorithms, however, can easily stretch well beyond the capabilities of this device, so Holt utilized <a href="https://docs.edgeimpulse.com/docs/edge-impulse-studio/learning-blocks/object-detection/fomo-object-detection-for-constrained-devices" rel="noreferrer">Edge Impulse’s FOMO object detection</a> algorithm to not only make the development and deployment process simple, but also to optimize the model for the Nicla Vision hardware.With the basic game plan finalized, Holt got together a few basic instruments, like scalpels and forceps, then took a set of about 600 images with the Nicla Vision. After these images were uploaded to Edge Impulse and used to train the object detection model, it quickly became clear that something was wrong. The object detection accuracy rate was too low for the model to be of any use. After some investigation, Holt determined that reflective objects were the problem. All of the reflections changed the features of the objects that the model detected. And unfortunately, a large percentage of surgical instruments have a reflective chrome surface.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzI4ODkxNDYwOTM4LWltYWdlNS5wbmciLCJlZGl0cyI6eyJyZXNpemUiOnsid2lkdGgiOjk1MCwiZml0IjoiY292ZXIifX19" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Generating synthetic data with NVIDIA’s Omniverse Replicator<h3 id="isPasted">More data needed</h3>Collecting a larger, more diverse dataset would likely resolve this issue, but that can be very challenging, especially in the context of surgical equipment. So, Holt came up with the idea of <a href="https://docs.edgeimpulse.com/experts/image-projects/nvidia-omniverse-replicator" rel="noreferrer">utilizing NVIDIA’s Omniverse Replicator to quickly generate a large, varied dataset</a> to further train the model. With this tool, 3D models of a wide variety of surgical instruments could be imported into a scene, then Replicator will move them around, adjust angles, lighting, and other factors to produce synthetic images that can be leveraged in model training. In this way, over 30,000 training images were produced.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzI4ODkxNDc5MDkxLXN5bnRoZXRpYy1kYXRhLnBuZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6OTUwLCJmaXQiOiJjb3ZlciJ9fX0=" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Synthetic image from Omniverse ReplicatorAfter uploading this new set of data to Edge Impulse, Holt kicked off another round of model training. The results were much more favorable. The average object detection accuracy had climbed to 85.5%, which is more than good enough to prove the concept. This is an important reminder just how important good training data is — without the boost from Omniverse Replicator, this project may have been abandoned as too impractical.<img src="https://images.wevolver.com/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJ3ZXZvbHZlci1wcm9qZWN0LWltYWdlcyIsImtleSI6ImZyb2FsYS8xNzI4ODkxNTAxMjA5LWltYWdlNC5wbmciLCJlZGl0cyI6eyJyZXNpemUiOnsid2lkdGgiOjk1MCwiZml0IjoiY292ZXIifX19" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">To put the finishing touches on the project, the object detection pipeline was deployed from Edge Impulse to the physical device. It was noted that the model can be deployed as an Arduino-compatible library, which allows for total customization of the application running on the hardware. In this way, the object detector could wirelessly communicate with a phone or tablet app, for example, via Bluetooth Low Energy to provide information about the surgical instruments used during a procedure. As a final step, Holt 3D-printed a small housing for the Nicla Vision and a LiPo battery that can be clipped to a shirt.It is amazing to think that with a bit of refinement, this inexpensive and relatively simple project could become a tool that saves lives in the future. Holt included a great deal of additional information in the <a href="https://docs.edgeimpulse.com/experts/featured-machine-learning-projects/surgery-inventory-synthetic-data">project write-up</a>, so be sure to take a look if you have any lingering questions or would like to get started building a wearable object detector for your own application.<hr><h3 id="isPasted"><img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1739291862428-1.png" style="width: 100%px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"><iframe width="540" height="375" src="https://c8056756.sibforms.com/serve/MUIFAMXbzNzNSyMeYsMybLI-54_IoJGam-Ow5Rafkxl9--KaPuomcDrglOqbvtjakyD2bXs-rydfKR0xW02WlzYWFyZRaIxw6KHBvpL-qZHhww0M5OsSm7r0LrA90cGrXNvcfbrPS_J7fBOttsX1qray3uaPjy5ps39DeMLyY0mPjNw-CYJyrnWFs9IZWDxJfo_GrULjpgCTCRnD" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" allowfullscreen="" style="display: block;margin-left: auto;margin-right: auto;max-width: 100%;" class="fr-draggable"></iframe> </h3>

Several factors contribute to the occurrence of retained surgical bodies. One common factor is the hectic nature of surgical environments, where numerous instruments and items are used during procedures.