Very cool medical breakthrough

From Slashdot:

Super-Flexible Circuits Could Boost Smartphones, Bionic Limbs
The microelectronic sensors and mechanical systems built into smartphone cameras and other tiny electronic devices may soon evolve into microscopic, custom-printed versions designed as bionic body parts rather than smartphone components.

Engineering researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a micro-printing process that can build microscopic microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) onto a flexible, non-toxic organic polymer designed for implantation in the human body.

Current-generation MEMS are typically found in the accelerometers in smartphones, or the tiny actuator motors that focus cell-phone camera lenses. Most are made from substrates based on silicon, and built using techniques common to semiconductor fabrication. The new process, as described in the journal Microelectronic Engineering, relies on an organic polymer that is hundreds of times more flexible than conventional materials used for similar purposes.

That flexibility not only makes the units easier to fit into the oddly shaped parts of a human body, it allows them to be made more sensitive to motion and energy-efficient. That alone would give a boost to the miniaturization of electronics, but the stretch and flex of the new materials could also serve as more comfortable and efficient replacements for current prosthetics that sense stimuli from an amputee�s nervous system to power a prosthetic arm, for example, or operate a synthetic bladder. In the datacenter context, super-flexible and sensitive materials could help make the next generation of hardware more efficient.

Very cool -- lots of places where this would be a godsend. I have an artificial hip and it would be nice to have something monitoring the wear. The circuitry could be powered like an RFID chip -- a 'reading wand' would be waved over the joint, power would be sent to the implant through radio frequency waves, the chip would 'wake up', measure and transmit the data. A simple outpatient procedure.