Plan: Analog electronics

The place of electronics and circuits in human life
Using electronics today is so much a part of our daily lives we hardly think of the way the world would be without electronics. Everything from cooking to music uses electronics or electronic components in some way. Our family car has many electronic components, as does our cooking stove, laptop and cell phone. Children and teenagers carry mobile phones with them everywhere and use them to take and send pictures, videos, and to play music. They send text messages on the cell phone to other phones and to their home computers.
Electronics devices are being used in the health field, not only to assist in diagnosis and determination of medical problems, but to assist in the research that is providing treatment and cures for illnesses and even genetic anomalies. Equipment such as MRI, CAT and the older X-rays, tests for diabetes, cholesterol and other blood component tests all rely on electronics in order to do their work quickly and accurately. Pacemakers and similar equipment implanted in the body is now almost routine.
This Viewpoint disucsses the melding of electronics and the human tissue to one day treat injury and disease. The human body is soft, curvilinear, and continuously evolving; modern electronic devices are rigid, planar, and physically static. Recent research has yielded a complete set of advanced materials, manufacturing approaches, and design layouts that eliminates this profound mismatch in properties. The resulting devices can intimately integrate onto or into the human body for diagnostic, therapeutic, or surgical function with important unique capabilities in biomedical research and clinical medicine. These emerging technologies have strong potential to improve human health and to enhance the understanding of living systems. They fall into 3 categories—soft, injectable, and bioreabsorbable electronics—each demonstrated in extensive animal studies and several in initial human trials. The Figure presents images of bioelectronic devices.