Tiny backpack for bees can track their position and temperature

A tiny sensor can work like a high-tech backpack for bees, tracking their position and temperature as they fly about. The sensor is so small that it could also be injected into a person’s body for monitoring what’s going on inside.

Bernhard Gleich at Philips Research in Hamburg, Germany and colleagues created the 1-millimetre-sized sensor using two, tiny opposing magnetic spheres inside a cylindrical housing.

To wireless check the conditions the sensor is in, the researchers remotely excited the magnets with pulses of current from electromagnetic coils. The distance between the magnets, how much they oscillate, and how much they expand and contract then helps them gauge the sensor’s temperature, pressure and location.

In one experiment, the team dropped the sensor inside a long, winding tube to mimic the gastrointestinal tract. They then recorded its path and position in 3D.

The team then tried attaching the sensor to the back of a honeybee. The researchers could then follow the bee’s journey while flying around and walking upside down in a box garnished with meadow flowers, allowing them to reconstruct the bee’s positions and flight

path.

The researchers think that the sensor could be most useful if implanted into a person’s heart to measure arterial blood pressure, stuck into tumours to monitor their status, or swallowed like a pill to trace health inside of the gastrointestinal tract and then excreted a couple of days later.

While there already are devices for each of these medical tasks, this sensor is particularly small, as well as wireless. “The deployment of the device is much less stressful and also much less costly [than other devices],” says Juergen Rahmer at Philips Research and part of the team.

This is an “interesting small device,” says Peter Dobson from the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the study. However, he says that it is still in the early stages of development, he says.

The research team speculate that it’ll take another five to eight years for the applications to make their way through clinical trials and arrive at the frontline. “We are now trying to push this closer to a product,” says Dobson. “Which means our demonstrator has to become smaller, it has to be more reliable and user friendly.

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