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Canadians Create Intelligent Medicine
RunAmuk writes "Engineers at the University of Calgary have developed a pill that, once swallowed, will determine how healthy or ill the patient is, and will release just the right amount of medicine accordingly, according to an article on Wired. As the sensors used in these pills grow more advanced are doctors going to be come obsolete except for real physical injuries? Of course, anyone who has been to a doctor in Canada understands that we need medicine that can do the diagnosis for them."
The iPill's electronic gadgetry, 400 square micrometers in size (roughly equal to the size of CmdrTaco's penis),
And moderators automatically mod these things up?
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
Where did they get the 10 cents price figure? This does not make sense either from the standpoint of the industry that will use the device or the industry that will make the device. Nothing related to healthcare is ever 10 cents -- FDA regs on manufacturing, the amortized cost of approvals, and sterile packaging all conspire to add cost. Moreover, the device must carry and medicine cabinet's worth of drugs, with each drug adding to the cost of the device. Even extremely simple ICs have a hard time getting to 10 cents and this little pill is far more complicated than a simple IC because it contains a CPU, powercell, biosensors, and medicine-dispensing MEMs. I'm not against the invention because it does sound like a really good idea. I am against hyping the device with unrealistic projections of price and capability.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Supercapacitors are terribly inferior in energy density to chemical batteries because they rely on the potential energy stored in separated electrical charges instead of the energy in atomic chemical bonds. A 1 Farad supercap only stores 0.28 mAh (assuming a 1V swing). A lithium battery of similar size can store 190 mAh.
Lithium cell(s) would be a better energy storage mechanism and would have the added advantage of being able to cure schizophrenia. I can only assume they chose supercaps so that the entire unit can be fabbed on a single die with no additional components, but that seems like an artificial constraint.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.