Michigan Engineering News

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Video: Self-monitoring device for diseases

Aaron Morris, Michigan Engineering’s new Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, shares about his work with innovative disks that can be implanted to enable real-time self-monitoring for a range of illnesses.

TED talk by Aaron Morris

1.3M views for a 2021 TED talk by U-M biomedical engineering post-doc and incoming faculty member Aaron Morris, who imagines a better way to monitor disease beyond invasive biopsies, frequent blood tests and expensive scans:

• First, a tiny disk is implanted under your skin.
• Second, tissues related to a disease, like multiple sclerosis, grow within the disk.
• Third, a lab easily extracts and analyzes the tissues for signs of disease.

In the future, a doctor could potentially implant hundreds of these disks inside
your body with remote sensors, enabling real-time self-monitoring for a range of
illnesses using only your phone.