Towards insertables: Devices inside the human body

摘要

As technology becomes smaller, the way we carry it has progressed from luggable, to wearable and now towards devices that reside inside the human body, or insertables . This trend is particularly observable in many medical devices, such as pacemakers that were once large stand-alone devices and are now completely inserted into the body. We are now seeing a similar trajectory with non-medical systems. While people once carried keys to open office doors, these have been mostly replaced with wearable access dongles, worn around the neck or clipped to clothing. Some individuals have voluntarily taken the technology from these dongles and inserted it directly into their body. In this paper we introduce insertables as a new interaction device of choice and provide a definition of insertables, classifying emerging and near future devices as insertables. This paper demonstrates this trajectory towards devices inside the human body, and carves out insertables as a specific subset of devices which are voluntary, non-surgical and removable.