Dissolvable Devices Keep Tabs on the Brain

A bioreabsorbable sensor. (Credit J. Rogers, University of Illinois) It was a pretty big “what if.” What if you could design an implantable medical device that was durable, reliable and accurate, but also dissolved into completely harmless materials when its work was done? The two concepts are a bit incompatible, but John Rogers and his team were up to the challenge of bringing them together. Rogers, a professor of materials science, engineering and bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, designed novel electronic sensors that collect crucial health data following a brain injury or surgery, and completely dissolve into cerebrospinal fluid when they're no longer needed. Rogers said making a "what if" a "what is" required “completely different classes of materials, those that are not only biocompatible, but biodegradable and end products that are biocompatible.” “I’m interested in ways to engineer electronics to solve problems of human health,” says Rogers. “You can think about that like advanced wearables, but also devices that implant inside the body.”