Here at Plant Services, we talk a lot about better and faster ways to monitor your equipment health. But what about increasing the signal speed of devices like pacemakers or camera capsules?
According to Popular Science: "A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign has found a way to increase the bandwidth for these electronic devices--a plan they call MEAT-COMMS.
Instead of using radio waves, the researchers created devices that transmit digital data via ultrasound. In the study, the researchers tested the speed and fidelity of wireless ultrasound communication between a transducer, which converts data into ultrasonic vibrations, and a hydrophone, a microphone that picks up sound waves underwater. They put the two devices on either side of a piece of meat (a plastic-wrapped beef liver in one trial, a pork loin in another).
They found that the maximum transmission speed was about 30 megabits per second, enough bandwidth to watch Netflix in Ultra HD quality. And while you probably wouldn’t use any of these devices to stream the latest movies inside your body (let’s be honest), that’s a big deal for researchers who want to use devices to gather data like video and send it back to their computers for analysis."