REAL LIFE NEWS: LIGHT UP MY TATS
by Hazed
After last week’s story about contact lenses that give you telescopic vision, here’s another serious invention intended for medical purposes, but which has consumer applications too: flexible LEDs that can be implanted under the skin.
The ultra-thin flexible sheets of inorganic light emitting diodes and photodetectors have been developed by researchers from the US, China, Korea and Singapore. They are intended for medical monitoring, activating photo-sensitive drugs, and other biomedical applications.
Potential biomedical applications for the LEDs include implantable patches for monitoring wound healing, for use in diagnosis or spectroscopy, or to control the delivery of drugs triggered by light in photodynamic drug therapy. They could also be used in light-emitting sutures or implantable illuminated plasmonic crystals, and may find application in robotics.
All very useful, but come on - what about using them to make amazing patterns? You could spell out your name in flashing lights, or have a “tattoo” that changed and moved. How cool would that be?
Source: http://phys.org/news/2010-10-flexible-implanting-skin.html
