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I'm sure this is old news, and while it isn't exactly available to the general populace...
Has anybody considered looking into reverse engineering an arterial cuff?
They're still in prototype form, but the patent hasn't actually been set in stone yet.
I realize this exists more in the realm of fantasy for your day to day transhumanist, and unless some of you people are actual surgeons I would never recommend trying to implant yourself with something that involves working that close to your arteries; still there must be a way to take this idea which is now a proven concept and expand upon it.
Also hi I'm new, so don't tear into me if this is stupid.
Basically it is an internal power source invented by the VA that wraps around the artery and the expansion/contraction of said artery generates power, which in turn can be directed to implanted devices.
tl;dr your heart beat powers your implants
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Hi Xahmen, welcome to biohack.me. Don't worry too much about noob treatment here. We tend to keep our nerd snobbery to a minimum.
I do remember discussing this at some point but I can't seem to find the thread now. It looks like a pretty cool idea. Power has been a major hurdle of ours. @ThomasEgi has done a lot in that area, and I think he was underwhelmed by the device's power output. Maybe I'm confusing it with a discussion about a glucose fuel-cell. -
the thing we talked about earlier was indeed a glucose fuel cell.
this thing here is a bit more interesting. during a heartbeat , bloodpressure does variate. for a normal humand and hearbeat around 30 torr. or almost 4000pa ot n/m²
having a big blood vessel , like your neck or the upper arm. let's take a random number of 5mm diameter here, and a clamp that is 10mm wide that'll already put a bit more than half a newton in place. depending on how much that thing can move, for random math take half a milimeter movement. that would already give a bit under half a millijoule per heartbeat.
since that thing should scale rather well. 0.5mW sound like a reasonable dimension (very rough estimation). that would already be enough to power a microcontroller and a realtime clockmodule with enough spare power to do some other ligh tasks.
might be worth to investigate blood-vessel clamps. piezos are rather easy to get and can easily output high voltages which can directly be used to charge capacitors, so they are easy. so. a bit of a smart mechanics with pressure-limit would be all that's needed.
drawback: only works for big, elastic blood vessles. so you need to be pretty close to the heart. neck, shoulders, upper legs maybe.
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Also factor in the big risks associated with DIY-implanting a clamp on or even anywhere near a major artery.
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So, how about going to a muscle?Going around a blood artery I'd fear to hinder bloodflow in any way. But in our legs musclemovement is used to pump blood anyway and there are muscles that are almost constantly in movement. Just attach it to the chest and use our breathing to fuel things?
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http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0038436This describes a glucose fuel cell that doesn't need the microbial or enzyme component. Could be useful, possibly more so than an arterial cuff.
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