H+ Digital Series - Medical devices of the future by Hollywood
By Mitch on Friday, 21 September 2012, 13:08 - Misc - Permalink
The scenarists of Warner Bros have unlimited imagination when they create a new series!
H+ Digital Series is the story about a computer implant that connect people to the internet 24 hours - 7 days. It's like the google glasses, with no glasses. The digital overlay is supposed to be sent direcly to the brain by cerebral waves or the like...
In their will of mimicking the reality, they've created a fake website of the company that designed the implant: Hplus Nano Teoranta and even user testimonials in the teasers of the series!
Wow! Will they have a fake booth at the world congress of neurology? :-)
The story
Everything goes wrong when a gang of hackers manages to introduce a virus in the implant. I suppose that scenarists took their inspiration from hacks done with existing implants. The first hack was reported by a team of researchers of the University of Massachussetts and the University of Washington in 2008.
The reality
While this series remains anticipation, reality is not so far from fiction. Though implants are not so sophisticated (and weak!) than those futurists invented by Hollywood, there are already some implants with digital electronics inside.
- You certainly have someone in your relatives with a pacemaker, an insulin-delivery system, or (less sure) a neural implant. Some of those have digital electronics,
- The Proteus ingestible biomedical sensor is a new kind of implant. As I said in a previous article, this is a double performance: technical with an ingestible sensor, and regulatory with clearance through the new "de novo" FDA process,
- Stanford University Laboratories have developed a Wireless Implantable Cardiac Device that is charged by microwaves. The problem of energy storage of all active implants is on the right track to be solved.
Yet, all these implants aren't computers. But the day may be coming when a medical device manufacturer launches on the market an implant with embedded nano-computers that communicate with the world outside the body.
From my very own software-centric point of view, it's clear that I won't be short of work for the next 50 years!
Btw, if you don't have access to the series (that's the case for most of people outside the US), you can still find some videos of H+ episodes on Youtube (the link may be destroyed soon).
Comments
Hello! What a fantastic post. I wrote the series and yes, we were inspired by some of the current tech avail in the world of medical implants... including a few that you pointed out here.
Just an FYI, for your international readers. The series is available on YouTube worldwide, with the exception of 5 markets: Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Chile. Chile can already watch the series on VTR.com, and the other four will be getting distribution soon.
Thanks, for the thoughtful post!