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Below is an ideal example of what may be an entirely new frontier of mixing semis and biologics to get the best of both worlds. Any other thoughts on how this market could or might evolve would be appreciated. This is one area I have seen very little research in that shows promise of large markets. The industry of interfacing semis to improve our bodies has been underway for years, but this is an entirely new direction that offers an entirely new frontier.
No matter how good we humans have made something, chances are nature did it better millions of years ago. Rather than compete, it’s often better to tap into the natural version – and that’s exactly what scientists have done with the Smellicopter, a drone that uses an antenna from a live moth to…
I did grad research in this area, and it's fascinating.
All the technology in electronics has largely been discovered and is being optimized to the teeth. Sure there are interesting frontiers in device shrinkage, but we know how to make an ADC, we know how to make a processor, etc. The name of the game at least in analog is elaborating the architecture to squeeze another 5% of juice out of an already mature technology.
Biotech still has lots of blue skies to explore. I researched muscle memory, and something as seemingly basic as knowing how far to throw a ball is still mysterious to us. We can pinpoint where at in the brain this information is stored, but how that thought gets encoded into physical neurons and then recalled later... it's still unknown. There's still a long ways down the neuroscience road we need to travel.
Interfacing biology and electronics is a challenge too... nerves just shoot single electrical pulses that are easy to read and mimic once you know the voltage, but when the nerves get dense, oh boy. The star project at our lab was a remote robot hand that transmitted tactile sensations back through a glove to the wearer. It was shockingly crude. We could put 2 or 3 electrodes on each finger, but there is something like 1000 nerve endings on your fingertips alone, so there's no way in heck we could replicate a natural level of sensation. Mother nature will have us engineers beat in tactile feel for a very long time.
When their are limited parameters, like the example, it becomes much more doable. I feel interfacing biology and semis is still in its infancy with oximeters, blood pressure, ECGs, blood sugar, pulse and this is just the very beginning of a very, very large market. Like replacing the retina to give people some sight as was done about five years ago. This will become a major market over the next ten years in my opinion. With AI/ML advancing along with big data the current human assist surgical robots will build enough data that will become superior to a human doctor within ten years in many areas. In diagnostics, I see it happening even sooner.
newatlas.com