#medical implants

[soviet-supersoldier]

In honor of Disability Pride Month, here are some headcanons I have for Omega Red and the struggles he has with his various implants. Some will be repeats from previous posts I have made on headcanons with him, but I figured having one where they're all together might be useful for some people who are looking at things to include if they are considering writing him and including the medical issues he likely has as a result of his implants.

Prior to getting the Carbonadium Synthesizer, Arkady was prone to wild changes in his health and fitness. His eyesight was something that was greatly affected by the radiation poisoning, being one of his first physical signs of his body deteriorating. The longer he went without taking life energy for himself, the worse his eyesight got.

The constant back and forth of needing to constantly heal the damage by Carbonadium poisoning has resulted in his baseline health being a little less than average, even though he has the C-Synthesizer now. The damage has gone down to the genetic level, making Arkady more prone to bouts of chronic pain from his decades of injuries and recoveries. The pain also makes Arkady rather ornery, which was even more of an issue when he didn't have the C-Synthesizer.

His C-Synthesizer makes whirring and clicking noises as he goes about his daily activities in time with his heartbeat.

Having the C-Synthesizer implanted in his chest took some time to truly get adjusted to. On some level, he is always aware of its presence in his body, and he still hasn't quite gotten over the feeling of living without the burning fire in his body from Carbonadium poisoning. There will be moments where he will just sit there and enjoy not being in crippling pain at the same level he used to be. But there will also be times he will wake up from a nightmare clawing at his chest afraid that the device has been taken away again.

His implants cause him migraines if he uses them too much.

His implants ache when there are changes in barometric pressure. Think of the old man complaining about an incoming storm by saying he "feels it in his knees." It would be the same for Arkady, just with the pain in his arms and his head where the majority of his implants are. His healing factor only does so much to counteract his body's response to the changes in air pressure.

Canonically, if Omega Red gets knocked out with his coils still outside his body, that is where they stay until he regains consciousness to draw them back into his body:

But with this, the computer-brain interface needs to reboot, which gives him migraines when he wakes up as his implants come back online. The same type of headache occurs if his implants have to reboot because of other incidents, such as being shocked by electricity or an EMP. With the C-Synthesizer now in his chest as well, Arkady experiences heart palpitations or heart arrhythmia until the device actually gets back in sync with his body. While he was on Krakoa/with X-Force and this happened and his body didn't fix itself, Sage and Forge would take a look at his implants and make the adjustments to address the issue. I also imagine Forge made a few additional updates to Arkady's implants after such incidents to try to prevent such issues from occurring as often so Arkady could enjoy the benefits of having the C-Synthesizer without having so much maintenance with the device.

There are times Arkady will struggle to be able to use his hands to do things. The way his coils are rooted into his forearms cross some connections with the nerves and tendons that move his hands, so he can't use both his hands and his coils at the same time on the same limb. If he is using his hands, his coils "idle" if they are outside of his body. If he is using his coils, his hands will lock into specific positions until he is done using them. But this also affects him when his coils are inside his arms as well, as sometimes the "wires will cross" and Arkady's hands or fingers will stop working the way he wants them to since his brain will think he is trying to use his coils instead. He has sloppy handwriting as a result -- unless he really takes his time to write out a message. Along with other issues handling objects.

Arkady doesn't like using his coils without some form of wrist guards or even being bare-wristed in general. He will use his implants without guards if he has to, but the wrist guards provide a little pressure around the entry/exit point of his coils that subconsciously makes Arkady feel safer using them. The fear of having them ripped out is very real for him, and fighting without wrist guards makes his implants feel a bit more exposed. It also keeps dirt, blood and other foreign objects from sliding inside his body after a fight, so he doesn't have to worry as much about something gumming up his internal mechanisms or getting stuck inside when he has wrist guards.

His coils are warm. The heat from his body keeps them warm when they are inside him, but because they are mechanical devices, they also have some ventilation systems inside to keep the coils inner mechanics at an optimal temperature. The only times they get cold is if he has been outside in the cold for long hours and been using them extensively in adverse weather conditions. Putting them back into his body under those conditions is a pain as his nerves will react to the extreme change in temperature when they are reintroduced into his body.

On behalf of my favorite medical cyborg, Happy Disability Pride Month!!!

[bpod-bpod]

Biofilm Blocker

Compared with free-swimming bacteria, those within a biofilm – a tough, slimy, strongly adherent layer – are considerably more resilient. Think of your teeth. Gargling mouthwash might eliminate some loose bacteria, but properly removing the plaque biofilm requires physical brushing. Of course, for a biofilm on a medical implant inside the body, brushing is not an option. And, with antibiotics being inefficient against such bacterial growths, serious chronic infections become a real threat. The good news is researchers have discovered a promising biofilm-preventing substance, naturally produced by plants. The metabolite, called MEcPP, prevents bacteria from producing fimbriae – filamentous structures that enable the bugs to bind surfaces and begin biofilm formation. The image shows bacteria with (top) and without (bottom) fimbriae, the latter due to high levels of MEcPP. Finding a way to coat medical implants with such a substance, might therefore be a strategy for blocking biofilms before they take hold.

Written by Ruth Williams

Image from work by Jingzhe Guo and colleagues

Institute for Integrative Genome Biology and Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, November 2024

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Orphaned neurological implants

The startup world’s dirty not-so-secret is that most startups fail. Startups are risky ventures and their investors know it, so they cast a wide net, placing lots of bets on lots of startups and folding the ones that don’t show promise, which sucks for the company employees, but also for the users who depend on the company’s products.

You know what this is like: you sink a bunch of time into familiarizing yourself with a new product, you spend money on accessories for it, you lock your data into it, you integrate it into your life, and then, one morning — poof! All gone.

Now, there are ways that startups could mitigate this risk for their customers: they could publish their source code under a free/open license so that it could be maintained by third parties, they could refuse to patent their technology, or dedicate their patents to an open patent pool, etc.

All of this might tempt more people to try their product or service, because the customers for digital products are increasingly savvy, having learned hard lessons when the tools they previously depended were orphaned by startups whose investors pulled the plug.

But very few startups do this, because their investors won’t let them. That brings me to the other dirty not-so-secret of the startup world: when a startup fails, investors try to make back some of their losses by selling the company’s assets to any buyer, no matter how sleazy.

A startup’s physical assets are typically minimal: used ergonomic chairs and laptops don’t exactly hold their value, and there’s not much of a market for t-shirts and stickers advertising dead businesses.

Wily investors are more interested in intangible assets: user data and patents, which are sold off to the highest bidder. That bidder is almost certainly a bottom-feeding scumbag, because the best way to maximize the value of user data is to abuse it, and the best way to maximize a failed business patent is to use it for patent trolling.

If you let your investors talk you into patenting your cool idea, there’s a minuscule chance that the patent will be the core of a profitable business — and a much larger chance that it end up in a troll’s portfolio. Real businesses make things that people want. Patent trolls are parasites, “businesses” whose only products are legal threats and lawsuits, which they use to bleed out real businesses.

The looming threat of dissolution gives rise to a third startup dirty secret: faced with a choice of growth or sustainability, companies choose growth. There’s no point in investing in sustainability — good information security, robust systems, good HR — if it costs you the runway you need to achieve liftoff.

Your excellent processes won’t help you when your investors shut you down, so a “lean” startup has only the minimum viable resiliency and robustness. If you do manage to attain liftoff — or get sold to a Big Tech firm — then you can fix all that stuff.

And if the far more likely outcome — failure — comes to pass, then all the liabilities you’ve created with your indifferent security and resiliency will be someone else’s problem. Limited liability, baby!

Combine these three dirty secrets and it’s hard to understand why anyone would use a startup’s product, knowing that it will collect as much data as it can, secure it only indifferently, and sell that data on to sleazy data-brokers. Meanwhile, the product you buy and rely upon will probably become a radioactive wasteland of closed source and patent trolling, with so much technology and policy debt that no one can afford to take responsibility for it.

Think of Cloudpets, a viral toy sensation whose manufacturer, Spiral Toys, had a successful IPO — and then immediately started hemorrhaging money and shedding employees. Cloudpets were plush toys that you connected to your home wifi; they had built-in mics that kids could activate to record a voice-memo, which was transmitted to their parents’ phones by means of an app, and parents could send messages back via the toys’ speakers.

But Spiral Toys never bothered to secure those voice memos or the system for making new ones. The entire database of all recordings by kids and parents sat on an unencrypted, publicly accessible server for years. It was so indifferently monitored that no one noticed that hackers had downloaded the database multiple times, leaving behind threats to dump it unless they were paid ransoms.

By the time this came to light, Spiral Toys’ share price was down more than 99% and no one was answering any of its email addresses or phones. The data — 2.2 million intimate, personal communications between small children and their parents — just hung out there, free for the taking:

https://www.troyhunt.com/data-from-connected-cloudpets-teddy-bears-leaked-and-ransomed-exposing-kids-voice-messages/

Data leakage is irreversible. Those 2,200,000 voice memos are now immortal, child-ghosts that will haunt the internet forever — after the parents are dead, after the kids are dead.

Data breaches are permanent. Filling a startup’s sandcastle with your important data is a high-risk bet that the company will attain liftoff before it breaches.

It’s not just your data that goes away when a startup folds — it’s also the money you invest in its hardware and systems, as well as the cost of replacing devices that get bricked when a company goes bust. That’s bad enough when it’s a home security device:

https://gizmodo.com/spectrum-kills-home-security-business-refuses-refunds-1840931761

But what about when the device is inside your body?

Earlier this year, many people with Argus optical implants — which allow blind people to see — lost their vision when the manufacturer, Second Sight, went bust:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

Nano Precision Medical, the company’s new owners, aren’t interested in maintaining the implants, so that’s the end of the road for everyone with one of Argus’s “bionic” eyes. The $150,000 per eye that those people paid is gone, and they have failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems.

Having a bricked eye implant doesn’t just rob you of your sight — many Argus users experience crippling vertigo and other side effects of nonfunctional implants. The company has promised to “do our best to provide virtual support” to people whose Argus implants fail — but no more parts and no more patches.

Second Sight wasn’t the first neural implant vendor to abandon its customers, nor was it the last. Last week, Liam Drew told the stories of other neural abandonware in “Abandoned: the human cost of neurotechnology failure” in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html

Among that abandonware: ATI’s neural implant for reducing cluster headaches, Nuvectra’s spinal-cord stimulator for chronic pain, Freehand’s paralysis bypass for hands and arms, and others. People with these implants are left in a precarious limbo, reliant on reverse-engineering and a dwindling supply of parts for maintenance.

Drew asked his expert subjects what is to be done about this. The least plausible answer is to let the market work its magic: “long-term support on the commercial side would be a competitive advantage.” In other words, wait for companies to realize that promising a durable product will attract customers, so that the other companies go out of business.

A better answer: standardization. “If components were common across devices, one manufacturer might be able to step in and offer spares when another goes under.” 86% of surgeons who implant neurostimulators back this approach.

But the best answer comes from Hunter Peckham, co-developer of Freehand and a Case Western biomedical engineer: open hardware. “Peckham plans to make the design specifications and supporting documentation of new implantable technologies developed by his team freely available. ‘Then people can just cut and paste.’”

This isn’t just the best answer, it’s the only one. There’s no ethical case for permanently attaching computers to people’s nervous systems without giving them the absolute, irrevocable right to nominate who maintains those computers and how.

This is the case that Christian Dameff, Jeff Tully and I made at our Defcon panel this year: “Why Patients Should Hack Medtech.” Patients know things about their care and their needs that no one else can ever fully appreciate; they are the best people to have the final say over med-tech decisions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i1BF5YGS0w

This is the principle that animates Colorado’s HB22–1031, the “Consumer Right To Repair Powered Wheelchairs Act,” landmark Right to Repair legislation that was signed into law last year:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

Opponents of this proposal will say that it will discourage investment in “innovation” in neurological implants. They may well be right: the kinds of private investors who hedge their bets on high-risk ventures by minimizing security and resilience and exploiting patents and user-data might well be scared off of investment by a requirement to make the technology open.

It may be that showboating billionaire dilettantes will be unwilling to continue to pour money into neural implant companies if they are required to put the lives of the people who use their products ahead of their own profits.

It may be that the only humane, sustainable way to develop neural implants is to publicly fund that research and development, with the condition that the work products be standard, open, and replicable.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: The staring eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Centered in it is a medieval anatomical engraving of the human nervous system, limned in a blue halo.]

[innonurse]

Rice team creating insulin-producing implant for Type 1 diabetes

Rice University bioengineers are using 3D printing and smart biomaterials to create an insulin-producing implant for Type 1 diabetics.

[lifewithchronicpain-original]

Faulty Medical Devices Blamed for Thousands of Deaths

By Pat Anson, PNN Editor The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said today it would take steps to modernize and improve its oversight of me

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said today it would take steps to modernize and improve its oversight of medical devices in the wake of a scathing series of reports that found faulty devices were responsible for over 83,000 deaths and 1.7 million injuries worldwide in the last decade.

The “Implant Files” project, a year-long joint investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over 50 media partners, found that the FDA approved many devices with little clinical testing and rarely pulled them off the market when problems arose.

Spinal cord stimulators have some of the worst safety records among the 4,000 devices tracked by the FDA. Stimulators are implanted near the spine and send electric currents designed to block pain signals from reaching the brain. The devices are often touted as a safer alternative to opioid medication in treating chronic pain and about 60,000 are now implanted annually.

But a review of FDA data found over 500 deaths and 80,000 injuries involving stimulators since 2008. Patients reported being shocked or burned by the devices and many had them removed. (Read more at link)

[engineeringworldhealth]

New 3-D printing method promises vastly superior medical implants for millions

For the millions of people every year who have or need medical devices implanted, a new advancement in 3D printing technology developed at the University of Florida promises significantly quicker implantation of devices that are stronger, less expensive, more flexible and more comfortable than anything currently available.

(read more)

[bpod-bpod]

Big Hearts

<<p>Parents know how frustrating it is to endlessly replace children’s clothes as they grow. But imagine having to replace essential body parts at the same rate. Children born with heart defects can need as many as five open heart operations to replace artificial implanted valves as they outgrow old ones. Now a new approach has developed a valve that can adjust in size as the heart grows. The valve, pictured at different degrees of expansion, consists of a stainless steel structure and two leaflets that allow one-way blood flow. The design was modelled on valves in veins of the leg, and the width can be adjusted by a comparatively straightforward balloon catheter procedure. Having been developed in the lab, assessed through computer simulations, and finally tested in growing lambs, the next step is to prepare it for use in human hearts, no matter how large they grow.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image by Sophie C. Hofferberth, Boston Children's Hospital

Department of Cardiac Surgery, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Science Translational Medicine, February 2020

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[bpod-bpod]

Do the Twist

Sharing creativity with architects and designers, bioengineers are exploring innovative ways to create intricate medical devices, albeit at a scale 10,000 times smaller than the Sydney Opera House. These tiny structures perfect a new trick – designs with a twist. A gold material is placed in patterns onto a stretched surface peppered with tiny cuts (top left). As the surface relaxes, the gold structures buckle, spiral or pop up into a 3D shape (bottom right), similar to the Japanese art of kirigami. As scientists know how the materials behave, these structures can be designed using computer models first, much like how computer-aided design is used for buildings and machines. Putting a twist into new artificial particles increases the flexibility of designs used in medical implants or sensors.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Hangbo Zhao and Kan Li, and colleagues

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL , USA

Image copyright held by the original authors; image reproduction permitted by PNAS

Published in PNAS, July 2019

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