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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 31 March 2010 and numbered DIA-08-1003-020, was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office under its Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. It surveys biosensors and biomedical microelectromechanical systems, covering brain-implanted micromachine neuroelectrodes, drug-delivery pumps, glucose sensors, neural interfaces, retinal prostheses, microfluidic lab chips, NASA cell-culture systems and microcantilever sensors. It concludes that the field is expanding rapidly, with nanomechanical systems expected to follow.
From the source:Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/31/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD surveys biosensors and BioMEMS, a broad class of miniature biomedical devices that combine microscale engineering with sensing, fluid handling, stimulation, or drug-delivery functions. The report reviews major application areas including implantable blood-chemistry sensors, neural interfaces, neurostimulation, drug-delivery pumps, microfluidic systems, and emerging nanoscale extensions of the field, while emphasizing that miniaturization can improve sensitivity and enable functions that are difficult or impossible at larger scales. However, it also makes clear that practical development is constrained by biocompatibility, long-term stability, sensor drift, device degradation inside the body, and the high regulatory burden associated with implantable medical systems. The document presents BioMEMS as a rapidly growing and productive field whose future advances are likely to come through continued improvements in fabrication, materials, and reliability.
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Electrode arrays are sometimes used, such as in the case of deep brain stimulation for
late-stage Parkinson's disease, which is characterized by tremors of hands. There is a
"brain pacemaker" that sends electrical impulses to specific parts of the patient's brain
via permanently inserted electrodes. This can stop the tremors for reasons that are not
exactly known and for which the best location in a given patient to place the electrode
is also not known beforehand. Thus introducing multiple electrodes and stimulating
each one in-turn until the best result is found allows a greater degree of possible
effectiveness and therapeutic result. MEMS techniques are being employed in this
application to permit a greater number of contacts and to reduce the size of the lead
wire on the electrodes.
MEMS multichannel electrode stimulating and recording electrode systems are also used
in brain interface applications to record or stimulate the activity of many neural circuits.
Such electrodes allow ability to record or stimulate complex muscle movements
associated with the limb such as in walking or in grasping objects with the hands.
Figure 20 shows an electrode system looking much like a bed of nails.
Figure 20. Scanning Electron Micrograph of a Brain Electrode Array Manufactured From Titanium and
Produced by a Process of Electrodischarge Machining ("Electrical Discharge Machining and Chemical Etching",
Fofonoff* , Martel, Hatsopoulos, Donoghue, Hunter)
All muscles of the body are activated by nerves that route to the brain. It is known from
careful studies conducted by many investigators over the years that there is a wiring
and physical mapping of the muscles to certain clusters of specialized cells in the motor
cortex of the brain.
It is also known that when a person plans or strongly imagines moving part of his body,
there is a complex electrical activation of the corresponding regions of the brain
involving many cells over a local area.
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 45 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.