Spine Implant Helps Paralyzed People Exercise

An anonymous reader writes "British engineers have created the first muscle-stimulating microchip small enough that several can be implanted in a person's spinal canal. In addition to providing enough stimulation to, say, let users pedal a stationary bicycle, they could also be used for things like stimulating bladder muscles to help overcome incontinence. Their breakthrough is that the devices package everything into one tiny unit. Lasers cut tiny electrodes from platinum foil, which are then folded into a 3D shape that looks like the pages of a book. These pages, in turn, wrap around the nerve roots."

Re:Exciting

[Konsalik]

This will become quite a serious subject once we start interfacing our biomedical implants with wider networks arround us such as PANs LANs and maybe even the internet. Worst case would be being able to kill somebody by hacking their devices.

Re:Exciting

[gknoy]

Oh, come on, it's not like we'd have to worry about people hacking our brains or altering everyone's perceptions in realtime [wikipedia.org]. Nobody would try that, and by "nobody" I mean "4chan".