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New Medical Camera the Size of a Grain of Salt
kkleiner writes "The German Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration recently reported the development of a camera with a lens attached that is 1 x 1 x 1.5 millimeters in size, which is roughly as big as a grain of salt. At about a cubic millimeter in size, this camera is right at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided. The camera not only produces decent images but is also very cheap to manufacture — so cheap, in fact, that it is considered disposable."
Privacy, we're fucked....
....then I might want to pick one up to play around with it and maybe find other uses for it
"The camera not only produces decent images but is also very cheap to manufacture — so cheap, in fact, that it is considered disposable."
It better be disposable, because at that size you're bound to lose a few of them here and there.
Do the cameras taste good on baked potatoes with butter?
...with a grain of salt.
(But watch out, that grain of salt might be a tiny camera.)
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
i think ill be taking this with a grain of salt. /badumpssht.
Maybe it's that kewl pretzel salt.
I don't know what would be more amazing. People confusing a 1mm cube for a "grain of salt", or people being unable to see a 1mm cube object without aid. That's like the size of a ball bearing, or short grain rice! I didn't realize SI units were this hard to grasp...
Put enough of them together and we might be able to make a decent approximation of the faceted eyes of insects
Privacy died a long time ago. At least when I get to the age where I have to worry about prostate cancer I won't be quite so... butthurt about it.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
otherwise, I would hate to be the intern on "recovery duty" when this camera is used in medical practice. All that squishing and sifting....
In the United States, where the hospital bills for a procedure of this kind are likely to run into thousands of dollars, "disposable" has a pretty broad definition.
Breakfast served all day!
A cubic millimeter is hardly "at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided". A fleck of dust is quite a bit smaller than that, and perfectly visible.
Sprinkle vision on the wind,
like grains of sand I see.
motes of thought they drift and float,
and bring my data back to me.
meh
might be cool to see blood coursing through your veins, or the contents of your stomach on your iPhone :)
meh
....healthcare cameras dispose of YOU!
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Actually it's about 2 mm^3, but hey, who rounds anymore, right?
I must have amazing vision because I can see things way smaller tha 1x1x1.5 mm.
Bab Shaw's book Light of Other Days makes a very good case for why something like this should NEVER be developed.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Cool! We can now ingest cameras and then poop them into a disposal chute! From the mouth to the anus; camera superhighway!
Geekism is your _only_ God!
Well, they better be, if any sort of recovery device is going to be several times the size of the camera itself...
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
My Margarita has a thousand eyes! GAHHH!
If they're so tiny and cheap it's bound to be interesting to make, say, a 10x10 array of these (or maybe 100x1?) and do true 3D in stead of stereo.
In terms of business and certain privacy concern intensive work, the constant shrinking of recording technology like cameras and the increasing undetectability of such devices makes for an interesting future, as far as secrets and company trust is concerned.
Then again, we can generally hope that as the technology to make these devices advances, so does the technology to be able to find them.
Okay, the tiny camera is good, but I didn't see any mention of a light source.
It's kinda, you know, dark in there.
"No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
Nine months from now, will these seem large and cumbersome?
Gently reply
Sperm cam!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Make this wireless, and people wont have to have giant tubes stuck down their throat during endoscopy. Or keep the giant tube, shove a whole bunch of these boys in, and create street view of the entire digestive system...
In case you didn't check the link, here how the camera looks like:
.
Seriously!
Put 16 of the tiny sensors together and you have a still very small 1-megapixel camera that could still be swallowed and would yield a view that is not just "good enough" but would be accurate enough to see malformations that could be pre-cancerous.
Camera small, like dust
Travel by wind, or fiber
Fantastic Voyage.
for my colonoscopy!
I couldn't get to the article directly or via coral cache OR google's site cache.. luckily google did have a text copy available, which I will provide for you here, free of charge:
Can you barely see this camera? Well, that's because it's right at the unaided resolution limit for the human eye.
Thanks to a German research institute, in the very near future, we may not even see the cameras looking back at us at all.
It may not be news that camera technology is getting smaller, but it is newsworthy when an important milestone is reached. Take the announcement from the German Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration for example. They recently reported the development of a camera with a lens attached that is 1 x 1 x 1.5 millimeters in size, which is the size of a grain of salt. At about a cubic millimeter in size, this camera is right at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided. The camera not only produces decent images but it is also very cheap to manufactureâ¦so cheap in fact that it is considered disposable. Though researchers developed the camera in collaboration with the Portuguese company Awaiba, the makers of digital camera sensors, for use in medical endoscopes to view all the nooks and crannies inside the body, other applications in electronic devices are already foreseen. There's even speculation that auto makers may utilize these microcameras as replacements for side mirrors in next-gen cars. And, of course, every government interested in keeping a closer eye on its citizens but doesn't have a lot of cashâ¦ahemâ¦will probably be watching this technology closely.
It's clear that the Fraunhofer researchers didn't set out to hit this milestone in camera technology. What they were really interested in was trying to improve upon endoscope technology. An endoscope involves a camera at the tip of a tube. The tube contains a wire that transmits the image back to a computer. The tube also serves as a way to physically manipulative the camera to snake it through the gastrointestinal tract, for instance. Typical endoscopes cost around $25,000-30,000 so they must be reused many times. Because the endoscope is going in and out of people's bodies, it must be cleaned and sterilized between each use, which just drives up the cost of maintaining the instrument. It's no wonder that hospitals charge more than $2,000 per endoscopy.
All of this, however, would change if the camera was cheap enough to throw away.
To accomplish this, the Fraunhofer researchers worked with Awaiba to redesign the endoscopes. Typical endoscopes have a lens at the tip but the sensor that converts the image into a digital signal is at the other end of the tube. Ideally, the lens and sensor should be close together so that they have direct electrical connections, which would help make the camera smaller. But previous designs forced connections between the lens and the sensor to be done individually rather than in a batch process because of the sensor's design. This is an expensive and time consuming process. The sensors are made on a wafer and previously each wafer would be diced up into 28,000 individual sensors so that the lenses could be attached. What the Fraunhofer researchers accomplished was to redesign the sensors, allowing the connections to be made on the back of the sensor rather than on its side. This means that a wafer of lenses could be mounted and electrically wired to the wafer of sensors, then the stack could be broken into 28,000 devices. The result is that the each microcamera can be made incredibly small for much less than before.
So how good is the camera? For endoscopy, pretty good. The resolution is 62,500 (250 x 250) pixels and can produce a frame rate of 44 per second at this resolution. That's not exactly the âoerazor-sharpâ pictures as claimed by the press release, but for endoscopy, it fits the bill. Now compared to an iPhone camera, which also contains a CMOS sensor but records nearly a million pixels at 30 frames per se
Pill sized disposable endoscopes already exist, though much larger than this. Most combine some sort of light with them as well because without it they are fairly useless. This won't perform anything novel when it comes to endoscopy but rather has more potential patient compliance as well as novel imaging of smaller pathways rather than just upper and lower GI. (Example: http://www.wolfsonendoscopy.org.uk/capsule-endoscopy-information.html)
Have a look - I found these on the Awaiba site.
http://www.awaiba.com/v2/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/NanEye_Camera_system_Spec_v0.0.05.pdf
development for hotel owners and land lords. You could easily set up multiple angle shots in shower cubicles.
Medical Camera ?
In the medical device world, it is common to have disposable instruments costing above 1 k$.
Actually, if you've ever wondered why rulers don't have millimeters markings on them, this is why--they can't be seen by the unaided eye!
An object 1x1x1.5mm is near the resolution limit of the human eye? This is ridiculous. Human hair is finer than that and I remember in grad school being able to see pulled glass fibers a few microns in diameter (without a microscope).
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Who is going to load the tiny film? /serious note, what is the interface; wireless?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
These people should learn how to use numbers so that they do not make absurd statements. 1.5mm by 1mm by 1mm would be a very coarse grain of salt. Anyone with close to 20/20 vision should be able to easily see it up to 1 meter away. A typical grain of salt is about 1 tenth that size in each dimension. The volume of the camera is 1.5 cubic nanometers, 1000 times smaller than the article reported, while a grain of salt has a volume of about 1 cubic picometers.
From the article: So how good is the camera? For endoscopy, pretty good. The resolution is 62,500 (250 x 250) pixels and can produce a frame rate of 44 per second at this resolution
1 x 1 x 1.5 millimeters in size ... right at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided
Let's be serious here, 1 millimeter is not the limit of what the eye can see.
1/10 mm would be more like it.
Jet Propulsion Laboratories has come out with a 3D camera, for brain surgery (developed in conjunction with a brain surgeon). It's not as small as this, but it's the size of a coffee bean. The constraint was 4mm; that's the largest passage they can make in a brain without causing serious harm.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
From TFA:
"...At about a cubic millimeter in size, this camera is right at the size limit that the human eye can see unaided...."
AFAIK the smallest thing viewable by the unaided human eye is 0.1-0.2 mm (100-200 microns).
I would hardly say that an order of magnitude is "right at the limit"?
How bad would your vision have to be to have trouble seeing this camera?
-Styopa
this could be a boon for laparoscopic surgery in the third world. if the camera is small enough and the resolution high enough, you could add cheap LED lights and slip it into an incision. That way you would have a laparoscopic camera without expensive fiber optics since the light source and the camera are within the body. This compounds the lower cost of the camera, making lap surgery cheaper for poor people
Who has read Vernor Vinge's great sf "A Deepness In The Sky"? Cool discussion about "localizers' - basically small cameras with WiFi. Hugely important tool for a government which wants to exert unlimited control over its citizens. They sure seemed like sf when I read the story back in 1999.