Well, after many hours, I received back a reply from another of the people there. He insists I need to blur out the thing that was proving problematic to blur. I had to track the location manually in After Effects because the motion tracking stuff was failing to keep centered on it. I just finished doing that (which SUCKED) and have it rendering now. It will take awhile, sadly. This does let me correct the typo, though, so that is good.
Anyway, as soon as possible, I will link the video here. It'll be a little bit, but hopefully sometime tonight.
@AlexSmith, it was my pleasure. You're doing amazing stuff for us. I'll likely have a Firefly video to post, too, once it arrives (thanks for the quick turn-around on the order, by the way). I'll probably show some geiger counter readings of it prior to implantation as well as what it reads through the skin after implantation (if it is even detectable at all through the skin, especially considering I likely lack the patience to sit there with a geiger counter on my hand for an hour to get a true reading). I never thought I'd get to use my geiger counter in conjunction with an implant, so that's going to be neat. Anyway, that video will include something for your site as well.
It will definititely be up tonight. Will be starting the upload shortly. For a sneak peek, have a look at my new avatar. It's a screenshot from the video. :)
I just made a short video of the implant in action. It is brighter tonight than it was this morning. Plainly visible under normal lighting conditions. I'm actually uploading that video first. I will be adding a link to it shortly.
:D that looks alright, but based on my experience with the fireflies, I think it will be a lot brighter in a week or two once it's healed more. btw, you can get different NFC apps for your phone which pulse the light in different patterns!
In a little over an hour, the implantation video will be done uploading. My apologies for the blurred spot that is bobbing around in the video. It was decided that the company logo visible in it might not be well-taken by said company. It doesn't obscure any of the action, though, so that's a good thing.
Regarding the flashing pattern, here's something really odd about that. The video shows the phone doing its standard polling for nearby ntags. Outside of my body, it would pulse once brightly and then twice dimly and then repeat that pattern forever. Once I had it in vivo, all the pulses look the same, and far more bright than I anticipated.
Be warned. The video is graphic and is littered with profanity ;)
I will post back again tomorrow night (probably 10pm Eastern or so) with new pics of the implant site. As of this moment, I have no pain at all unless I twist my arm too far or apply too much pressure to the site. The area is slightly warm to the touch and still has some swelling. There is also some visible (but painless) bruising.
ThomasEgi you have much better low level electronics knowledge than I do, can you comment on why the NFC polling would change once implanted?
I've been re-watching the video of the light flashing. It's actually very cool. It looks just like something from a sci-fi movie... but it's real! makes me want to do an implant with complex patterns and different colored lights...
Um I just watched that video....@aviin you are a savage that was great. I was kringing watching that. I can't believe you used no lido.
My buddy watched and just was grossed out the whole time. I wish I had videoed our reactions to it.
The fact you were doing this yourself and kept cool with minor shakes PLUS LAUGHED is amazing. I had the shakes from my damn RFID and it was the tiny one in my hand. You are a testament to pain management.
Looking forward to the next video of the lighting up.
Damn. That's awesome. I saw watched it after reading @Meanderpaul talk about recording a reaction video, but didn't end up doing it. It would have been a boring video anyway, Just me intently staring at the screen with a permanent smile that grew the more you swore. :3
But yeah, that video is awesome. I was wondering if you could have slid the probe in through the exit hole and then inserted it slightly into the mouth of the hollow needle to help guide it through.
I also had to laugh when it said that the "next video" would showcase it in action, when that video was shared first. :)
You know, @trybalwolf, that would have been an excellent suggestion at the time. Wish I'd thought of it.
I'm glad the videos are being appreciated. I'll never do another implant without video to go with it, so expect more. Not to derail the thread from the subject at hand, but I've got the green Firefly on the way (and I will be doing it within a couple days of it arriving) and I've still got this custom factory-run of gold-plated 3mm x 10mm N52 cylinders from K&J Magnetics that I intend to implant several of (I've got something like 240 of them here... gave ten to a friend for use with some ferrofluid). Those will likely get an additional plating of rhodium before implantation. In fact, maybe I'll have to make my way over to the place that was going to do that rhodium plate for me and see if I can't get a couple of them plated tomorrow). I've already 3D-printed a few custom injectors for those. I've also got nine(!) ntags sitting here in injectors in sterile pouches, but since I've already got two implanted, do I need more? Hmmm... Anyway, videos for everything from now on. You can count on that.
Now back on the subject, I'll post some pictures of the site later tonight. I was having a weird feeling of "wrongness" in the area earlier, but that has passed since I got home from work. I wish I knew a better way to describe it. It wasn't pain, it wasn't pressure, it wasn't, well, anything directly identifiable. Just wrongness. As I said, though, that has passed entirely now.
There's still the same amount of swelling. The red line that I thought was somehow marking the path of the needle below the surface is, I've decided, actually just marks left by the forceps. Holding my arm up and looking at the area immediately between the band-aids (I downgraded to those from gauze and tape pretty quickly because the tape irritates my skin; band-aids do, too, but to a lesser extent), there is a somewhat insignificant purple-ish bruise that runs the length between the band-aids and just to the right of where the needle ran. The rest of the area has a lesser brownish bruise. Nothing severe at all. I can feel the implant under the skin with my fingers when I run them across the area, but at least until the swelling reduces some (and I worry I'm overstating the swelling... it's very minor), I cannot actually see the shape of the implant raised up from the skin. Perhaps later it will be somewhat visible all the time, though I'm thinking not.
The exit wound looks very good. I should say both exit wounds, because I ultimately ended up exiting the flesh in two spots very close to one another. At any rate, I would feel comfortable not even covering those up anymore, but I'll go another day or two before I leave them uncovered permanently.
The entry wound, on the other hand, while looking healthy, is ugly. It's an appreciable hole. Nothing oozing, no nastiness at all, but it's, well, a hole. I'm hoping (and it looks like) the tissue has bonded down in such a way that it closed off the entry to the needle passageway, but that damnable gigantic needle decided to take some flesh away, so I'm left with a small hole that's missing all the skin with the red "meat" laid bare. The hole is slightly ovular, maybe 3-4 mm across at it's widest point and 2-3 mm deep. I'll be very happy when that closes over. All in good time, I suppose. At any rate, the hole is smaller than the size of the antenna end of the implant, so it can't really work its way out. It would already take a scalpel to remove the device, I think.
I've been doing some thinking about the fact that those needles physically removed so much tissue as opposed to just separating layers... Presumably, some amount of detached tissue was left behind inside my arm. I have a friend who, after cancer surgery, had to have a second surgery to remove some detached necrotic tissue in the area. With small bits of flesh like mine likely would be, should I be concerned? And for anyone who (foolishly?) follows in my footsteps later, would it have been advisable to irrigate the entire tunnel through the tissue with saline after it was bored to rinse out anything like that? If I'd thought of it at the time, I'd likely have done it.
That sounds generally positive. Though I think we can come up a better implant procedure for future implants. E.g. using a blunt rod to create a tunnel under the skin might be better.
my thinking behind the cut and suture method is that you can install it in areas that you could not with a needle and pulling it through. what if someone wants one on a curved part of their body?
plus, it already looked like quite a bit of trauma already, and i wonder if a quick cut & suture might be better in that regards as well despite a longer incision made.
edit: plus plus, the incision would be smaller than the ones made to install GH's Northstar and those seem to be doing well .
My personal take on that method, @ightden, and don't think I didn't consider it, is that the larger the opening in the tissue, the greater the chance of infection during healing. I would suppose that's part of the reason for laparoscopic procedures as opposed to older methods. That, and to avoid large externally visible scars, which also applies here. If I'm going to scar myself, it might as well be an internal one (unless the visible scar is desired, which in this case, at least for me, it wasn't).
Haven't taken the pictures I promised yet. Got tied up programming. Yeah, that overly ambitious timeframe for the project I mentioned way earlier in this thread proved impossible to keep, meaning there's still work to do :(. Then again, I'm one of the owners and this project has huge potential monetarily for me, so I can hardly back down from it. One of my business partners (and a good friend) stopped by my "day" job today and just shook his head about my new light. He's too squeamish to watch the implant video. He's been insistent I'm going to die ever since I first mentioned I was thinking about doing magnets over a year ago. Haven't died yet, though :)
Now what if you made a small incision, opened a pocket with a blunt tool, and then placed the implant into a blunt tipped stainless steel tube such that the led and wires were within the tube and the antenna portion protruded from the front as it would be too large to slide into the tube? Damn that was a long sentence... >.<
Doing this would allow you to have a single incision, and to simply insert the implant and hold the antenna portion in place while you removed the tube from the pocket. Seems like an easier route to me. Especially as you could bend the tube to accommodate implanting in curved locations.
@trybalwolf, you're saying insert the antenna end first? I see two issues with that.
You're underestimating just how generally floppy this implant is in this incarnation. The antenna end would end up bending to one side or the other as you tried to slide it in. A custom tool for the implantation could alleviate that part, though. Think of a small spatula-shaped object. Basically, the same shape as the implant itself. I'll use TinkerCAD to approximate the shape quick... This...
But with rounded edges (that little diagram was made in about 30 seconds, so it is not refined or properly to scale). So you'd make your single incision and long pocket, put the implant on this guy (maybe lubing up the spatula with KY to aid in helping the implant slide free of it), then insert it antenna first into the pocket. With the right amount of pressure placed on the antenna, or if the spatula's head were perhaps just a smidge shorter than the antenna itself so it hung off the end just a bit, one could then retract the spatula and leave the implant behind. Now admittedly, this requires a custom tool (the spatula), but I could have 3D-printed it right here at my house. Had it occurred to me, I might have tried that. But there's still the second issue...
The other issue with this method would be that there would be more internal damage this way because you'd need a pocket the full width of the implant for its entire length. Then again, you only have one point of entry for bacteria, so that might be worth it.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Perhaps the next implantee will take advantage of this. If someone wants to try the spatula to implant one of these (has anyone bit on the second one @AlexSmith made?), hit me up. I'd need to know all the dimensions of the implant (length, width, and height of the antenna and separately the wire/bulb). I'll print you one in PLA and ship it to you at no cost if you promise to make a video of the implantation and share it publically. I used a custom 3D-printed PLA injector that incorporated a factory-produced piercing needle to implant my second ntag as a proof-of-concept, but it generated little to no interest when I posted about it here. I did disinfect it (presumably effectively), but I don't remember if I used chlorhex or iso. There's a thread somewhere that talks about that...
And the pic isn't fantastic. Sorry. But the site looks pretty decent. Most of my scalpel work was internal, really, so I think a large part of the entry hole was just due to stretching of the tissue with the probe. There is new tissue growth happening there, too (hard to see in the pic, but there is new tissue), but I wonder how much of it closing is due to the tissue sort of going back into shape. I should mention that I've been keeping the triple antibiotic on it so far. I clean it a couple times a day with a light wash of saline, and once today I did hit it with 91% isopropyl alcohol. Boy, did that sting.
I'm really happy about this implant. The implantation went pretty smoothly, I did it without lidocaine, I did it left-handed, and I didn't loose my cool at all. And I made a damn fine couple videos.
Thanks again, @AlexSmith. You're doing great things.
I'll post more tomorrow, I'm sure, if for no other reason than to document the healing process.
Comments
Anyway, as soon as possible, I will link the video here. It'll be a little bit, but hopefully sometime tonight.
@AlexSmith, it was my pleasure. You're doing amazing stuff for us. I'll likely have a Firefly video to post, too, once it arrives (thanks for the quick turn-around on the order, by the way). I'll probably show some geiger counter readings of it prior to implantation as well as what it reads through the skin after implantation (if it is even detectable at all through the skin, especially considering I likely lack the patience to sit there with a geiger counter on my hand for an hour to get a true reading). I never thought I'd get to use my geiger counter in conjunction with an implant, so that's going to be neat. Anyway, that video will include something for your site as well.
Regarding the flashing pattern, here's something really odd about that. The video shows the phone doing its standard polling for nearby ntags. Outside of my body, it would pulse once brightly and then twice dimly and then repeat that pattern forever. Once I had it in vivo, all the pulses look the same, and far more bright than I anticipated.
I absolutely love the thing.
Be warned. The video is graphic and is littered with profanity ;)
I will post back again tomorrow night (probably 10pm Eastern or so) with new pics of the implant site. As of this moment, I have no pain at all unless I twist my arm too far or apply too much pressure to the site. The area is slightly warm to the touch and still has some swelling. There is also some visible (but painless) bruising.
Can we use this as a means of powering implants with a little more power demand?
I'm watching this after breakfast.nim gonna make some other people watch too ;)
My buddy watched and just was grossed out the whole time. I wish I had videoed our reactions to it.
The fact you were doing this yourself and kept cool with minor shakes PLUS LAUGHED is amazing. I had the shakes from my damn RFID and it was the tiny one in my hand. You are a testament to pain management.
Looking forward to the next video of the lighting up.
I'm glad the videos are being appreciated. I'll never do another implant without video to go with it, so expect more. Not to derail the thread from the subject at hand, but I've got the green Firefly on the way (and I will be doing it within a couple days of it arriving) and I've still got this custom factory-run of gold-plated 3mm x 10mm N52 cylinders from K&J Magnetics that I intend to implant several of (I've got something like 240 of them here... gave ten to a friend for use with some ferrofluid). Those will likely get an additional plating of rhodium before implantation. In fact, maybe I'll have to make my way over to the place that was going to do that rhodium plate for me and see if I can't get a couple of them plated tomorrow). I've already 3D-printed a few custom injectors for those. I've also got nine(!) ntags sitting here in injectors in sterile pouches, but since I've already got two implanted, do I need more? Hmmm... Anyway, videos for everything from now on. You can count on that.
Now back on the subject, I'll post some pictures of the site later tonight. I was having a weird feeling of "wrongness" in the area earlier, but that has passed since I got home from work. I wish I knew a better way to describe it. It wasn't pain, it wasn't pressure, it wasn't, well, anything directly identifiable. Just wrongness. As I said, though, that has passed entirely now.
There's still the same amount of swelling. The red line that I thought was somehow marking the path of the needle below the surface is, I've decided, actually just marks left by the forceps. Holding my arm up and looking at the area immediately between the band-aids (I downgraded to those from gauze and tape pretty quickly because the tape irritates my skin; band-aids do, too, but to a lesser extent), there is a somewhat insignificant purple-ish bruise that runs the length between the band-aids and just to the right of where the needle ran. The rest of the area has a lesser brownish bruise. Nothing severe at all. I can feel the implant under the skin with my fingers when I run them across the area, but at least until the swelling reduces some (and I worry I'm overstating the swelling... it's very minor), I cannot actually see the shape of the implant raised up from the skin. Perhaps later it will be somewhat visible all the time, though I'm thinking not.
The exit wound looks very good. I should say both exit wounds, because I ultimately ended up exiting the flesh in two spots very close to one another. At any rate, I would feel comfortable not even covering those up anymore, but I'll go another day or two before I leave them uncovered permanently.
The entry wound, on the other hand, while looking healthy, is ugly. It's an appreciable hole. Nothing oozing, no nastiness at all, but it's, well, a hole. I'm hoping (and it looks like) the tissue has bonded down in such a way that it closed off the entry to the needle passageway, but that damnable gigantic needle decided to take some flesh away, so I'm left with a small hole that's missing all the skin with the red "meat" laid bare. The hole is slightly ovular, maybe 3-4 mm across at it's widest point and 2-3 mm deep. I'll be very happy when that closes over. All in good time, I suppose. At any rate, the hole is smaller than the size of the antenna end of the implant, so it can't really work its way out. It would already take a scalpel to remove the device, I think.
I've been doing some thinking about the fact that those needles physically removed so much tissue as opposed to just separating layers... Presumably, some amount of detached tissue was left behind inside my arm. I have a friend who, after cancer surgery, had to have a second surgery to remove some detached necrotic tissue in the area. With small bits of flesh like mine likely would be, should I be concerned? And for anyone who (foolishly?) follows in my footsteps later, would it have been advisable to irrigate the entire tunnel through the tissue with saline after it was bored to rinse out anything like that? If I'd thought of it at the time, I'd likely have done it.
That's all for now. Pics later tonight.
Haven't taken the pictures I promised yet. Got tied up programming. Yeah, that overly ambitious timeframe for the project I mentioned way earlier in this thread proved impossible to keep, meaning there's still work to do :(. Then again, I'm one of the owners and this project has huge potential monetarily for me, so I can hardly back down from it. One of my business partners (and a good friend) stopped by my "day" job today and just shook his head about my new light. He's too squeamish to watch the implant video. He's been insistent I'm going to die ever since I first mentioned I was thinking about doing magnets over a year ago. Haven't died yet, though :)
You're underestimating just how generally floppy this implant is in this incarnation. The antenna end would end up bending to one side or the other as you tried to slide it in. A custom tool for the implantation could alleviate that part, though. Think of a small spatula-shaped object. Basically, the same shape as the implant itself. I'll use TinkerCAD to approximate the shape quick... This...
But with rounded edges (that little diagram was made in about 30 seconds, so it is not refined or properly to scale). So you'd make your single incision and long pocket, put the implant on this guy (maybe lubing up the spatula with KY to aid in helping the implant slide free of it), then insert it antenna first into the pocket. With the right amount of pressure placed on the antenna, or if the spatula's head were perhaps just a smidge shorter than the antenna itself so it hung off the end just a bit, one could then retract the spatula and leave the implant behind. Now admittedly, this requires a custom tool (the spatula), but I could have 3D-printed it right here at my house. Had it occurred to me, I might have tried that. But there's still the second issue...
The other issue with this method would be that there would be more internal damage this way because you'd need a pocket the full width of the implant for its entire length. Then again, you only have one point of entry for bacteria, so that might be worth it.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Perhaps the next implantee will take advantage of this. If someone wants to try the spatula to implant one of these (has anyone bit on the second one @AlexSmith made?), hit me up. I'd need to know all the dimensions of the implant (length, width, and height of the antenna and separately the wire/bulb). I'll print you one in PLA and ship it to you at no cost if you promise to make a video of the implantation and share it publically. I used a custom 3D-printed PLA injector that incorporated a factory-produced piercing needle to implant my second ntag as a proof-of-concept, but it generated little to no interest when I posted about it here. I did disinfect it (presumably effectively), but I don't remember if I used chlorhex or iso. There's a thread somewhere that talks about that...
Pictures of my implant site in a few moments...
http://s20.postimg.org/gt770j4ot/Img_0013.jpg
And the pic isn't fantastic. Sorry. But the site looks pretty decent. Most of my scalpel work was internal, really, so I think a large part of the entry hole was just due to stretching of the tissue with the probe. There is new tissue growth happening there, too (hard to see in the pic, but there is new tissue), but I wonder how much of it closing is due to the tissue sort of going back into shape. I should mention that I've been keeping the triple antibiotic on it so far. I clean it a couple times a day with a light wash of saline, and once today I did hit it with 91% isopropyl alcohol. Boy, did that sting.
I'm really happy about this implant. The implantation went pretty smoothly, I did it without lidocaine, I did it left-handed, and I didn't loose my cool at all. And I made a damn fine couple videos.
Thanks again, @AlexSmith. You're doing great things.
I'll post more tomorrow, I'm sure, if for no other reason than to document the healing process.