An ingestible paper battery ran for days inside a pig
Victoria Shinder1 min readResearchers at MIT have built an ingestible paper battery intended to power a medical device inside the body and then break down safely, reported by IEEE Spectrum at https://spectrum.ieee.org/smart-pills-ingestible-biodegradable-battery.
Giovanni Traverso, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, reports what it managed in live pigs: enough power for "meaningful functions" in the gut, and specifically two of them - wireless communication at a range of about a metre, and electrical stimulation kept up for several days.
What it means
Two specifications are doing the work, and neither is capacity. Metre-scale wireless communication sets the radio budget - enough to reach a receiver outside the body, and no more. Continuous stimulation over several days sets the discharge profile. A cell designed to those two numbers is a different object from one designed for energy density, and it is why paper is a plausible substrate at all.
Biodegradability is the requirement that removes a whole retrieval problem. A device that must be recovered needs a procedure, a schedule and a failure mode when it does not pass. One that dissolves converts an ongoing clinical obligation into a single dose - which is the real difference between a research demonstration and something a hospital would use.
⚠️ This is animal-model research. No human trial, regulatory step, or timeline is reported, and the quoted performance is the researchers' own account of their tests.