AVS 65th International Symposium & Exhibition
    MEMS and NEMS Group Wednesday Sessions
       Session MN+2D+AN+NS-WeA

Invited Paper MN+2D+AN+NS-WeA1
BioMEMS for Eye Applications

Wednesday, October 24, 2018, 2:20 pm, Room 202B

Session: IoT Session: MEMS for IoT: Chemical and Biological Sensing
Presenter: Yu-Chong Tai, California Institute of Technology
Correspondent: Click to Email
The field of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) has advanced tremendously for the last 20 years. Most noticeably, however, the field has mostly advanced in microsensors such as pressure sensors, accelerometers, gyros, microphones for cell phone and smart instrumentation applications. Looking forward though, in my opinion, one future direction of MEMS/NEMS is for micro biomedical devices. Among many possible biomedical applications, one challenging but promising branch is micro implants. Why micro implants? Body tissues (especially neurons), once severely damaged, do not repair or regenerate easily and often leave behind permanent debilitating deficits. Engineering implant technologies to interface intact tissues and/or to replace defective functions have continued to be the main solutions for many diseases. As our world is facing more severe aging population problems, significant growth in implant applications is foreseeable. As a matter of fact, there are already many existing commercially available implants such, as pacemakers and cochlear implants, but they all have a lot to improve. For examples, cardiovascular implants like defibrillator and pacemakers are still bulky, mechanically rigid, power hungry, and functionally limited. The future implants should be even smaller, flexible, power efficient and more versatile so that they can be used at places not possible before. This talk will review the research of implants done at the Caltech MEMS lab. More specifically, this talk will focus on bioMEMS implant devices to treat eye diseases. Examples of devices will cover the four major ophthalmic diseases, i.e., cataract, glaucoma, age-related macular disease and diabetic retinopathy that make of close to 80% of world blindness. It is believed that BioMEMS can also have many other opportunities for other organs in our body too.