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Mobile Phone in Your Teeth!

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yes-gimme-gimme-now dept.

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.

3 of 434 comments (clear)

  1. Hearing aid technology? by crow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  2. E-911 anybody? by sterno · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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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  3. Great idea, but use as a general-pupose tranceiver by maddogsparky · · Score: 4, Insightful
    You could have it be a "dumb" device. It could communicate with the actual device a la Blue tooth and just act as a speaker and microphone.

    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.

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    science is a religion