Smart Implants

Smart Implants

by Adeyinka Adenikinju

The FDA defines medical implants as devices or tissues placed inside or on the body’s surface. Many of these are prosthetics, intended to replace missing body parts. Other implants deliver medication, monitor body functions, or provide support to organs and tissues (FDA, 2019).

They could be made from skin, bone, other body tissues, metals, plastics, ceramic, or other materials and may be placed permanently or removed once they are no longer needed.

At this point, you might begin to wonder what is smart about implants in healthcare, but then traditional implants often cause challenges for patients and surgeons, and there lies the need for a solution which happens to be the invention and use of “Smart Implants.” In response to the need for solutions that replace exceptionally higher efficiency of regenerative medicine, patient rehabilitation, and a cure for many types of disabilities that have previously been considered incurable (Khristich, 2022).

So, what then are smart implants? They are Implants that collect data in-vivo, process that data with embedded processors, and then go a step further by transmitting that data, in real time to the patient’s healthcare team (DELMONICO, 2022). They provide therapeutic benefits and diagnostic capabilities. They can enable personalized medicine, improve care for individual patients and improve outcomes while reducing the costs of care.

traditional implants, scientists and researchers have made considerable progress and it is predicted that by the year 2023, more implant-related choices and technologies will enter the healthcare market worldwide. This promises

Smart implants are of use in various specialties of medicine and are snippets or a glimpse of future healthcare with scientists advancing from the strides made. To appreciate the exciting times ahead in the application of smart implants, we focus on the Spermbot and its use in reproductive health.

Asthenozoospermia, which is the inability of healthy sperm to be mobile (inability of the sperm to swim) and incapable of fertilizing the egg (inserting genetic materials into the egg) affects around 7 percent of all males, but spermbots which are tiny motors developed by a team of researchers from the institute for integrative NanoSciences at IFW Dresden in Germany can make the sperm swim better and get to the eggs.

among others which could cost thousands of dollars for every round of assistance (Ozdemir, 2021).

This smart implant is basically made of a tiny micromotor, which is a spiraling piece of metal that wraps around the sperm’s tail, and taxi’s the sperm to the egg where fertilization takes place, thereafter the motor slips off without disrupting the process or harming the egg; making it not only a potential cure to male infertility but it would also be a less expensive form of assisted reproduction

Why then are the spermbots not being used right away? Well, the researchers are not sure how the woman’s immune system would react to their presence, there are still some areas to perfect like the spermbot sometimes refusing to slip off the sperm, and most importantly the experiments have not been carried out on humans because it is not “yet” viable (Ozdemir, 2021). Nonetheless, this is a good example of what the future holds with advancement in healthcare aided by smart implants. The application of smart implants has been used in knee arthroplasty, hip arthroplasty,

spine fusion, fracture fixation, infection detection, early dislocation detection, bone ingrowth measurement, spine fusion detection, fracture healing measurement, early detection of osteolysis, and so on. As seen in the earlier examples of the application of smart implants, though the technology underlying smart implants in orthopedics has improved over the last several decades, there are significant technical challenges that continue to exist and need to be overcome before smart implants become part of mainstream health care.

The twentieth century also witnessed research backed by the Bill and Melinda gates foundation, that could provide a new option for contraception in the form of an implantable microchip that could be switched on and off. This smart device is exceedingly small, containing a reservoir of hormones that can be released every day, and could last for 16 years by design (Magazine & Griggs, 2014).

A remote control is made available for turning it off when

the woman wants to conceive thus saving the woman a trip to the doctor unlike when using other contraceptive implants. Even though this option gives the woman more control over her reproductive choices, we can but see similarities with its use when compared to the situation with the “spermbots.”

Safety concerns exist, what if the hacking of the remote control is not preventable, or a malfunction of the signals on the implants, or someone else laying hands on the remote control?

There are other specialties in medicine where the use of smart implants has shown tremendous progress in the outcomes of patient healthcare. A quick look at the need for smart implants in orthopedic medicine reveals that traditional implants as common as total knee arthroplasty (surgical knee replacement of a knee damaged by arthritis) currently in use are usually affected by postoperative joint biomechanics which depends on the surgical technique and design of the implant. These factors can affect the range of

motion, the survival rates, and the long-term outcomes of the implants. Despite the advancement of surgical techniques, allowing for joint replacements, all friction surfaces in orthopedic implants still experience load-dependent disintegration which eventually reduces the useful lifetime of the devices. Orthopedic implants are usually passive and the effect of implants on the body can only be forecasted, hence the need for a real-time monitoring capability that could tell whether recovery is going according to plan or the need for care adjustment.

Embedding sensors that provide real-time information to the surgeons and caregivers in the implants make them smart and useful for positioning the implant during surgery and aiding assessment after the surgery. We thus can see that Smart implants in orthopedic medicine can provide diagnostic capabilities along with therapeutic benefits which include reducing costs for readmissions, costs for expensive complications, quickening patient recovery,

and the use of insights obtained from the implants to improve future implant designs, develop better strategies for surgery and improve recuperation of the patients.

There are several products out in the market from companies such as Orthosensor, Intellirod spine, SpineGuard, etc. Companies like Zimmer, Smith & Nephew Inc., and Stryker have partnered with Orthosensor for VERSASENSE, noticeably, the top companies in the space are yet to invest in smart implant technology.

More exciting applications of smart implants can be seen in neurology with the likes of Neuralink which has set its sight on the year 2022 to start the implanting of its chips in humans but we would explore that in part 2 of this write-up.