Browse Topic: Anatomy
Every kid who has read a comic book or watched a Spider-Man movie has tried to imagine what it would be like to shoot a web from their wrist, fly over streets, and pin down villains. Researchers at Tufts University took those imaginary scenes seriously and created the first web-slinging technology in which a fluid material can shoot from a needle, immediately solidify as a string, and adhere to and lift objects.
A sweat-powered wearable has the potential to make continuous, personalized health monitoring as effortless as wearing a Band-Aid. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an electronic finger wrap that monitors vital chemical levels — such as glucose, vitamins, and even drugs — present in the same fingertip sweat from which it derives its energy.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and New York’s Columbia University have embedded transistors in a soft, conformable material to create a biocompatible sensor implant that monitors neurological functions through successive phases of a patient’s development.
Researchers at Cornell University, working with collaborators, have created an extremely small neural implant that can sit on a grain of salt. Despite its size, the device can wirelessly transmit brain activity data from a living animal for more than a year.
This study evaluates whether a statewide layered medical-drone architecture can improve time-critical EMS logistics in Florida by delivering blood products, AEDs, and critical support devices. We define Time-To-Clinical-Support (TTCS) as the interval from incident recognition to first effective therapy and use Florida EMS benchmark intervals, county-level population and centroid distance data, and p-median hub placement to model system performance. Scenario analysis compares 20-, 40-, and 60-hub deployments and estimates order-of-magnitude effects on AED TTCS and survival gains under explicit assumptions for availability, cruise speed, dispatch overhead, and bystander uptake. The results indicate that a mid-scale network may reduce delay sufficiently to produce meaningful clinical benefit, provided it is integrated with EMS dispatch, medical direction, cold-chain controls, and hurricane-resilient infrastructure. Regulatory pathway constraints, incomplete county-level OHCA data, and uncertainty in mission availability remain the primary limitations on precision and external validity.
In response to the 42nd (2025) Annual VFS Student Design Competition, the Graduate Student Design Team from the University of Maryland introduces Wyvern, a novel hydrogen-powered electric compound rotor-craft engineered for maximum loiter and operational safety. Named after a mythical dragon that defies convention by not breathing fire, Wyvern only breathes water vapor by forgoing hydrocarbon combustion in favor of the quiet and clean power of hydrogen. This design reflects not only an aeronautical solution to an engineering challenge but a greater aspiration to reshaping how practical and clean vertical flight can be achieved.
With the rapid development of automated driving and the increasing adoption of “zero-gravity” seats, the crash safety of highly reclined occupants has become a critical issue. The current THOR dummy, designed for frontal impacts in the standard upright posture, exhibits limitations when directly applied to reclined seating configurations, including insufficient spinal flexion capability and excessive posterior pelvic rotation. In this study, the thoracolumbar spine kinematics of the THUMS human body model, reconstructed against post-mortem human subject (PMHS) tests, were analyzed. A two-segment linear fitting was employed to characterize a “dummy-like” spinal flexion response, yielding a virtual rotational hinge located near the thoracolumbar joint of the original THOR model. The characteristic rotation angle obtained from THUMS showed a strong linear correlation with the flexion moment of the T12–L1 vertebrae. Based on this relationship, the rotational joint of the THOR dummy was unlocked during impact and assigned a torsional stiffness of 600 Nm/rad. Additional modifications were implemented in the hip region to enhance model applicability. Comparative simulations demonstrated that the modified THOR model achieved closer agreement with PMHS responses than both the Hybrid III and the baseline open-source THOR models. In particular, the posterior pelvic tilt was reduced from approximately 20° in the baseline THOR to about 10° in the modified version. These results indicate that incorporating PMHS-based thoracolumbar flexion characteristics together with targeted hip modifications significantly improves the biofidelity of the THOR dummy for reclined-occupant crash scenarios, providing a solid foundation for future dummy development and safety assessment.
Innovators at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) have developed an Earthbound robotic training system called “ARGOS” for short. It can actively simulate an astronaut’s weightlessness in space by using an overhead runway and bridge drive system to partially or fully offload their weight using attached cables, effectively suspending them off the ground. Although the test subject’s torso and legs are offloaded, their arms and any weighty hand tools are not.
There’s a quiet revolution happening deep in the anatomy that doesn’t start with robotics or AI-assisted navigation, but with something far more fundamental: materials. The push toward miniaturized medical devices, especially in vascular intervention, isn’t just about making things smaller but also making devices that can be efficacious in the small anatomy.
Wearable or implantable devices to monitor biological activities, such as heart rate, are useful, but they are typically made of metals, silicon, plastic, and glass and must be surgically implanted. A research team in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis is developing bioelectronic hydrogels that could one day replace existing devices and have much more flexibility.
Intestinal anastomoses — the surgical connection of two sections of the intestine after the removal of diseased tissue — carry a considerable risk of post-operative complications. In particular, circulatory disorders or immunological reactions can lead to serious consequential damage or even death within a short period of time. However, direct monitoring of the suture site has not been possible until now, which often entails corresponding risks for patients as well as considerable costs due to follow-up operations and long hospital stays.
A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego has developed an electronic sticker that can monitor a person’s vitamin C levels using the sweat from their fingertips — no blood draws, lab visits, or batteries required. The flexible sticker, which attaches to the outside of a drinking cup, collects trace amounts of sweat as a person grips the cup. Within minutes, the system harvests enough power from the sweat to analyze it for vitamin C and wirelessly sends the results to a nearby laptop. The device was published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics.
A noninvasive method for measuring blood glucose uses Raman spectroscopy — a light-based technique that identifies molecular composition by analyzing how near-infrared light scatters within tissue. The shoebox-sized prototype eliminates the need for finger sticks or implanted sensors, offering a potential alternative for people with diabetes who require frequent glucose monitoring.
A team of biomedical engineers at Georgia Tech has unveiled a breakthrough in adaptive optics: a bio-mimetic, light-powered soft lens that mimics the human eye’s ability to refocus and adjust to varying light conditions. The research, published in Science Robotics, opens new possibilities for soft robotics, biomedical imaging, and autonomous vision systems.
Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea
A Detroit-based startup says its device can analyze brain activity to help figure out whether a driver is impaired. The impaired driver-detection business has been heating up since even before NHTSA announced in 2024 that it was working what would eventually be a mandate that vehicles be able to detect impaired drivers and mitigate the danger they represent to the motoring public.
Engineers have developed a technique for inkjet printing arrays of special nanoparticles that enables the mass production of long-lasting wearable sweat sensors. These sensors could be used to monitor a variety of biomarkers, such as vitamins, hormones, metabolites, and medications, in real time, providing patients and their physicians with the ability to continually follow changes in the levels of those molecules.
Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science Daejeon, Republic of Korea
Scientists used a “smart” shirt equipped with an electrocardiogram to track participants’ heart-rate recovery after exercise and developed a tool for analyzing the data to predict those at higher or lower risk of heart-related ailments.
Anatomy of a HELIX Flight
Items per page:
50
1 – 50 of 5192