Historical research guide · 0360 · 2010

DIRD Biosensors and BioMEMS-A Survey of the Present Field

DIA / AAWSAP contractor

In one minute

This is the biomedical entry in the reading list Hal Puthoff administered for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and its subject is the crew rather than the craft. Its author, writing from a working laboratory, surveys devices built with the same photolithography that makes computer chips but aimed at the body: pumps that release a drug at a steady rate instead of a spike, sensors that watch blood sugar or oxygen from inside a vessel, electrode arrays fine enough to read the intent to move out of the motor cortex about a tenth of a second before a muscle responds, and cantilever beams light enough to weigh a single virus particle. He is unusually frank about where the field actually stands. The electronics are not the obstacle. The body is: after decades of work, no self-contained implanted sensor has survived long-term, because the chemistry wears out or the immune system closes over it.

Connection

Chapter 1’s evidence ladder rests on what the programme actually commissioned, and this page of that list shows it buying a hard-nosed survey of body-scale engineering alongside its papers on the vacuum. For chapter 13 it supplies the human half of the unified picture: whatever flies, someone has to be inside it, powered, monitored and connected to the machine.

From the source

Designing at this scale is not scaling down a familiar device: capillary force, van der Waals forces and electric-field forces become relatively strong as dimensions shrink, and in the realm of the very small the force of gravity is far less important than electrical charge and viscosity.What is BioMEMS?, Characteristics of BioMEMS, pp. 1–2
In a healthy person the intent to move can be detected as microvolt signals from motor-cortex neurons about 120 milliseconds before any muscle movement occurs, and in a person who has lost a limb or become paralysed the intent is still detectable even though nothing moves — so a computer trained on enough implanted electrodes can determine planned motion and drive a robotic limb.Brain-Implanted BioMEMS Micromachine Neuroelectrodes, p. 4; Bioelectrodes and BioMEMS, pp. 23–24
Scar tissue is what defeats an implanted brain electrode, and a gear-driven micromachine built jointly by Arizona State University and Sandia National Laboratories answers it: an electrostatic comb motor oscillating at about 40 Hz on about 15 volts repositions the electrode in 8.8 micrometre steps over a 5 millimetre range, and single-unit recordings were obtained from the somatosensory cortex of adult rats over three days.BioMEMS Micromachines, pp. 3–6; Figures 2, 3, 4 and 5
A glucose sensor can be built on heat rather than on electrical current: the glucose oxidase reaction releases 79 kilojoules per mole, and a thermopile of dozens of series bismuth-antimony junctions on a thin mylar substrate, rolled into a catheter, resolves the resulting rise of about ten millidegrees — implanted in a pig it recorded the fall in blood glucose following insulin administration.Thermopile Implantable Glucose Sensors, pp. 15–19; Figures 12 to 16
An implantable neurostimulator measuring 0.9 by 1.2 millimetres, small enough to pass through the lumen of a syringe needle, draws its power from about 1 MHz ultrasound through a stack of 25-micrometre PVDF sheets rectified by a Schottky diode, and has been implanted in rats and shown effective; because ultrasound is a mechanical vibration carrying significant energy, transfer across the skin is easier than magnetic induction at similar depth and size.Microscale in Therapeutic Neurostimulation, pp. 30–32; Figures 28 and 29
The unsolved problem is the interface, not the electronics: despite decades of work no self-contained implantable continuous-monitoring sensor has succeeded for long-term use, and even the most advanced biosensors fail over days or weeks as the sensor chemistry wears out or the immune system attacks the interface — failure is not generally attributed to the materials the sensor is made of.BioMEMS Implantable Sensors, p. 13; Thermopile Implantable Glucose Sensors, pp. 19–20

The way in

https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/dia/AAWSAP-DIRDs/DIRD_20-DIRD_Biosensors_and_BioMEMS-A_Survey_of_the_Present_Field.pdf

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

Defense Intelligence Reference Document, Acquisition Threat Support. DIA-08-1003-020, 31 March 2010 (ICOD: 1 December 2009), produced under the Defense Intelligence Agency Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. Released under FOIA and published by The Black Vault. AUTHOR. Withheld under FOIA exemption (b)(6), and the preparing office under 10 USC 424. Internal evidence points to Bruce C. Towe of the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering at Arizona State University — the paper says several of the technologies described ‘have been the subject of research by the present author and by colleagues at Arizona State University’, and the thermopile glucose sensor, the ultrasound-powered neurostimulator and the NASA microfluidic cell-culture system are each credited in their captions to ‘Towe et al.’ at ASU — but the released copy names no one, so this is an inference and not an attribution. SUBJECT NOTE. This is the biomedical-devices entry in the series of 38, not a propulsion or field-physics paper; it is carried here for the evidence ladder of chapter 1 and for the crew-and-platform side of chapter 13. TEXT. Full text below, pages vi to 39. The document carries a copyright warning against further dissemination of its photographs, so the thirty-six figures are not reproduced; their captions are kept because several carry the engineering, and the long broken source URLs printed inside some captions are dropped. Micro symbols, chemical formulae and capitalisation mangled by the scan are restored; a few figure cross-references in the released copy are off by one and are reproduced as printed.

How to cite it

DIA / AAWSAP contractor (2010) DIRD Biosensors and BioMEMS-A Survey of the Present Field https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/dia/AAWSAP-DIRDs/DIRD_20-DIRD_Biosensors_and_BioMEMS-A_Survey_of_the_Present_Field.pdf

Where it sits in the curriculum

The reference documents and the institutional record