Internal heating and cooling
@bsharbi gave me an idea after he posted this:
http://www.micropelt.com/applications/applications.php
Used for heating or cooling some electronics devices.
Then I remembered this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/health/13core.html
This device cools or heats you body by heating or cooling the blood in
your hands which then gets pumped to the rest of your body. The cooling
function greatly improves athletic performance. The power glove uses a
vacuum to bring blood vessels to the surface of the skin, which looks
dumb and renders one hand useless.
A subdermal device that uses micropelt wouldn't need a vacuum system,
since the device would be put right next to blood vessels anyway.
Feedback?
http://www.micropelt.com/applications/applications.php
Used for heating or cooling some electronics devices.
Then I remembered this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/health/13core.html
This device cools or heats you body by heating or cooling the blood in
your hands which then gets pumped to the rest of your body. The cooling
function greatly improves athletic performance. The power glove uses a
vacuum to bring blood vessels to the surface of the skin, which looks
dumb and renders one hand useless.
A subdermal device that uses micropelt wouldn't need a vacuum system,
since the device would be put right next to blood vessels anyway.
Feedback?
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Comments
In reply to the facebook discussion, here's something I sent to Brian earlier -
I think it would work - even a small temp difference gives power. It's just a question of which technology gives you more power at a specific size - and what the minimum size is for each technology.
Another thought i had for inductive energy transfer is to have a couple magnets to keep the coils aligned, so you could get max power transfer. Kinda stupid, cause you'd have to have some sort of mass energy storage on the implant, and you'd have to charge it often/ish, but it would allow you to implant a more active device
applied to a human body, you need do transfer heat out of the body. naturally this is done by either a cooler environment, or by evaporation of sweat.
if you have a subdermal device, there is no way do transfer the heat away from the body because the only place to "pump" it is back into the body itself.
so the only way to get anything done would be by having a transdermal device with a radiator to get rid of all the excess heat.
and even if you'd go through all that trouble, it still requires a lot of energy to actually operate such a device. energy you either have to supply externally.
the only way that's somewhat imagineable is by implanting a container with a chilled liquid/gas, and have it exchange heat wtih your body at defined rates on demand. but that'd have more disadvantages than putting some icecubes in a towel and putting it around your neck.
about heating. your body would try to counter-act against any increase in temperature that's not healthy. if you want to increase your body temperature by 4 degrees fahrenheit (i'd ask you to use centigrade in future), that'd make 2 degrees celsius. for a 80kg body makes 160000gK*4,2J/gK makes bout 670kJ of energy. for the initial heating. That's about 180Wh of energy which equals to a 12V battery with 16.6Ah capacity, which would be a car battery with roughly 6kg of weight. and that's without your body doing anything against that additional heating.
so. long story short. putting a wet towel in your neck does a great job for cooling, wearing an extra layer of clothing for heating. technical (especially electrical) sollutions are not suited for mobile or longterm use. and implanted devices are pretty much out of question.
my calculation was the absolute minimum value (assuming the body does _nothing_ to get the temperature down to normal and perfect thermal insulation)
if you use resistors for heating you'll get a 100% heating efficiency. you can expect the actual energy requirement to be a much higher than my physically idealistic number. besides, vaporative cooling (aka sweating) is extremly effective.
the product you linked only heats a spot to treat injuries. heating a few cubic centimeters of skin and muscle is not the same as heating 80kg of body mass.
besides that. heating only a part of your body is easily tollerated by the body itself as it hardly affects overall temperature.
heating the body would be pretty much like artificial fever. i don't see what good it would to except causing major discomfort.