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Researchers Create Computer That Fits On a Pen Tip
CWmike writes "Researchers at the University of Michigan announced Wednesday that they have created the first prototype for a millimeter-scale computing system that can hold up to a week's worth of data when implanted in something as small as a human eye. The computer, called the Phoenix chip, is just over one cubic millimeter in size and was designed to monitor eye pressure in glaucoma patients. 'This is the first true millimeter-scale complete computing system,' said Dennis Sylvester, a professor at the school and one of the researchers on the project. Within the computer is an ultra low-power microprocessor, a pressure sensor, memory, a thin-film battery, a solar cell and a wireless radio with an antenna that can transmit data to an external reader device held near the eye."
I must say.
...when I can skip Lasik and go straight to cybereyes. I'm sick of paying for contact lenses and glasses just to give me 20/20 vision. I want IR, UV, and better than human-standard sight with recording capabilities. Oh yeah, and augmented reality without the damn external glasses.
"A week's worth of data" - What is that in LOCs?
Researcher Create Computer That Fits On Pen Tip
My team obviously went the wrong direction. We've just completed work on a breakthrough - a pen that's large enough to fit onto a computer - comfortably. We figured that computers were tired of just writing to disk, so we'd let them write on paper as well. The actual apparatus is so comically large, that, obviously, only a large-ish computer would want to use it.
Embarassing.
Informatus Technologicus
Okay fine, but what am I going to do with the rest of the pen? Throw it away? Sheesh, stupid researchers.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Glad they integrated solar cell. That way after it's implanted in your eye you can always recharge it by staring at the sun.
Excerpt from section 3.1 of user manual, page 66: "To recharge the battery, simply stare straight at the sun for 4 hours."
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
A week's worth of NASA's data or week's worth of data on stephen hawking's sporting achievements?
...actually that might have been a bit low...
Every Phoenix project crashes & burns - should've called it "mote"!!
Now we have to tell paranoid schizophrenics that it is merely improbable that a microchip could be implanted in their body, monitoring various functions on behalf of the Illuminati, and transmitting to their underground city.
A weeks worth of eye pressure data sampled every 15 minutes. If you had taken the time to at least skim TFA instead of writing a stupid, pointless post you might have learned something.
Well, I read it, and found that, but I didn't see any clue that would tell me how to convert that to bits or bytes. A "week" of data is about as useful as the common "Library of Congress" as a measure of information.
So please explain further why we're being so stupid when we fail to understand such units of measurement.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I know this is /., but seriously now....Real-time collection and reporting of blood pressure, heart rate (or not!), glucose, cholesterol, liver enzymes, O2 and PSA levels, all relayed via your cellphone/base station to your trusted medical service. These are right around the corner, awaiting only the right transducers. I, for one, welcome our new medical capabilities.
Well, if it's measuring intra-ocular pressure, it's likely not recording much data. Figure a date and time stamp and lets say 5 digits for the IOP measurement itself (15.517, for example). Store that in a CSV file and you're going to end up with something around 22 bytes. If you take a measurement every 15 minutes, you're looking at 96 per day, or 672 per week. That leaves you 14,784 bytes of data, or roughly 14.4 kilobytes.
My phone can store 32 gigabytes in the space roughly equivalent to a fingernail. That means the storage density on something like this is really quite low in comparison to what we have today (yes, the whole thing is in that tiny package, but I still doubt the storage area is smaller than 0.04% the area of an SD-micro card). No, the really interesting bit is the fact that they can make something that small and still keep it from causing a really nasty infection.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
No. They couldn't get the graphics drivers for the eye.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.