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Mobile Phone in Your Teeth!
thumbtack writes "News.com is running a story that reports that British researchers claim to have developed an implant that could be placed in a tooth and used as a mobile phone. According to the article, the sound would be transferred to the inner ear by bone resonance, and could be listened too anytime anywhere, with complete privacy." This is awesome. Course it would kinda suck if your phone rang when you were asleep.
Traditional hearing aids are simply microphones and speakers to make the noise louder. They work fine for some people, but this type of technology bypasses the eardrum altogether, hinting at the possibility of sending sound to some who otherwise wouldn't be able to hear at all.
I don't know much about this or related technologies. Is there any substance to my gussing above?
Excellent, combine phone implants with the ability to rapidly triangulate any cell phone, and you've got embedded tracking of the citizenry. Weeeee, sign me up! I'm not with Al Qaeda so I shouldn't have any reason to hide, right?
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This is really interesting. Lots of uses as we can all imagine. What I find most interesting is that this "toothPhone" is just a small step away from Jane in Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead.
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
So how would you power such a device? Run a wire out of your mouth? Have an emf field be generated outside of the cheek and have the chip convert it? What about an antenna? Hold two fingers up at the back of your head???
Course it would kinda suck if your phone rang when you were asleep.
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Or having sex, or eating, or exercising, or talking on another phone
And we thought carnivore has scary implications now
-Sean
Specially when it's been announced today [bbc.co.uk] that mobile phones pose a health risk.
Yes, but then they've been reported to not be a health risk, and then they were a health risk, and then they weren't, and so on and so on and so on for a couple years now. Considering the amount of "health risk" the average person endures on a daily basis I think that it's silly to split hairs over mobile phones. Could they give you cancer? Possibly. But so does half the stuff I eat, secondhand smoke from bars, and electromagnetic radiation from any of a dozen other possible sources in my environment. Can they prove that my use of a cellphone will take a year off my life? 5 years? 10 years? If not, what's the point? I could use a cellphone for four hours a day every day and die in a car wreck at age 35.
Benefits to using it as a dumb device would include allowing audio communication with any device that communicates in that protocol (laptops, PDAs, cell phones, pagers, portable audio devices, or even cordless adapters to work with an existing device that has an existing stereo headphone or line-in/out jack.
While the article is low on details, I would guess that it would be possible to implant multiple devices that are tuned to the user's individul characteristics to provide high fidelity, stereo sound.
I hesitate at using any previously mentioned technology implanted in your body other than for medical reasons, but this sounds really cool. Depending on price (and the results of safety studies), I would sign up for this one.
science is a religion