A medical monitoring equipment had just been reduced to the size of a grain of sand. Like a ‘micro fitbit in the body’, it is able to keep watch on conditions from within. And perhaps, open up new possibilities for internal wearables.

About a year ago, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley re-engineered the fitness tracker concept into a Wireless sensor so small it could be implanted inside the body. This tracker was not designed to do calorie counts, however. The dust-sized sensor goes deep into the nervous system to access gigabytes of data, all in real-time.

“You can think of it as sort of an internal, deep-tissue Fitbit,” said Michel Mahabriz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with Reuters. The first potential uses would be for where it’s most needed — this particular prototype was designed to monitor neural activity for the treatment of conditions such as epilepsy.

The entry of fitness trackers such as Fitbit and Jawbone in the early decade revolutionized the health and wellness world by giving normal people real-time insights into the health and wellness of their bodies. It was unprecedented. Up until the new millennium, we could only ‘look inside’ through blood tests and CT scans. Fitbit revealed personal metrics such as heart rate, calorie counts, and quality of sleep. These days people even use their Fitbit data as medical evidence when consulting family doctors. The revolution was a rewarding one. But as we all know now, data collected by wrist-band Sensors were, at their best, accurate estimates or the lowest in errors.

The idea here at Berkeley was to make current medical monitoring technologies wireless, access, and transmit data right from the source. Having achieved this means there is now a model for high-precision sensors.

When we think about the Internet of Things, we think of smart refrigerators and thermostats; but medical devices have become increasingly network-connected. Smart pacemakers, insulin pumps, and CT scanners have been part of IoT installations since the 2010s. So what’s new about this one?

A crucial part of the Internet of Things is network technologies such as NFC, Wi-fi, and LTE that enable the ‘communication between things’. The network technology used in this sensor is really the cleverest part of the device. It uses Ultrasound Waves. The ultrasound waves not only retrieve and transmit data, it also powers the sensors. It’s the piezoelectric crystals in the sensor‘s components that convert the ultrasound waves into electricity.

Re-engineering medical electrodes and monitoring equipment into internal wireless sensors opens up new potentials. The Berkeley researchers foresee uses beyond monitoring.

For a start, the same wireless implants can offer a more efficient means of controlling next-generation prosthetics. The maths is there. The same ultrasound waves used to transmit data can be used to transmit instructions – in this case, directly from the brain.

Implants such as these will not only be wireless sensors; they will also be wireless controllers.

Indeed, why stop at health and wellness. If an amputee can control his prosthetics via an implant, he can also unlock the door or start the coffee machine with it.

A 2016 study by Ericsson ConsumerLab on wearable technology and the Internet of Things report an overwhelming readiness in smartphone users for wearables to go beyond health and wellness. Apparently, 6 in 10 smartphone users believe ingestible pills and chips under the skin will be used to interact with objects by 2021, for functions such as unlocking doors and making payments. They call it internal wearables or internables, and they require no verbal or physical input from the user.

When pioneer Kevin Ashton first created the term Internet of Things, he described it as a means of acquiring data, analyzing it, and acting on solutions without the help of humans. Today, these so-called internables seem closest to that vision.