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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.
Normally, I don't get so upset at this sort of thing, but for some reason, idiocy like this has pissed me off today. No, the eardrum does NOT translate vibrations to sound, or any other such nonsense.What the eardrum (or timpanum) does is to act as the first step in hearing something.
Sound waves travel through the air, striking the eardrum. The eardrum vibrates, causing the bones of the middle ear to vibrate as well. Now, I can't remember the order of vibration, but I can tell you that one of those three bones is attached directly to the eardrum, and it, in turn, causes the other two to vibrate. Finally (and I'll admit that my knowledge becomes more hazy here), the third bone is attached directly to the cochlea (or inner ear), which translates those vibrations from the third bone directly into nerve impulses, which are sent to the brain.
The eardrum itself is nothing more than the starting point for the whole sequence. If you can directly vibrate the bones correctly, you can create a sound which nobody else can hear.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
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.
One thing REALLY bugs me about this.
How do you charge the battery?
Seriously, the only easy way is a magnetic inductance charger. But then who wants to have a jaw recharger hanging from their lips for 3 hours or more? Contact charging is even worse with conductive saliva. It would be like having a 9-volt battery under your tongue all day. And how long can a battery that small hold a charge? Even if it just transmits to a signal booster on the belt a few feet away that will still suck down the juice on the battery constantly.
The concept is silly and pointless.
If we could have radioactive plutonium batteries that small it MIGHT work, but there is no room for adequate rad shielding in a tooth-sized area.
"Face it, a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.