MIT Develops Jet-Injection Device to Replace Needles
Not many folks I know enjoy having to receive an injection. Mostly this has to do with the fact that they don’t like needles. Needles can leave bruises, aren’t the most accurate of tools and involve piercing our protective layer of skin to even work. But that all might change soon with Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s development of an incredibly accurate jet-injection device. Welcome to the future.
The team, led by Ian Hunter, can inject whatever may be needed through the skin near the speed of sound — 340 meters per second — in under a millisecond. Not only can it inject, it can extract! Now that’s something even Alton Brown can get behind, given his distaste for single-purpose items.
Not that this kind of injection scheme is an entirely new one. Others have proposed the same thing but this is the first time that the device has included fine control. The depth of the injection as well as the amount of drug delivered can both be shifted as needed. As an added bonus, drugs that come in the form of powder can be manipulated by the device to behave like liquid and be injected like anything else.
But wait, it gets better. Because the diameter of the devices injection area would be no larger than that of a mosquito’s proboscis, you wouldn’t really feel it just like you don’t often feel the bite of said mosquito.
(MIT News Office via Geek.com)
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