Implant

Definition

An object or mechanism added to another object by the process of subduction.

In the medical and general sense, an implant is a device placed inside the body, either permanently or for an extended period, to replace a missing biological structure, support a damaged one, or add a function the body does not have.

In Humans

Implants divide usefully into three groups, and the differences between them matter more than the fact of being implanted.

Restorative implants replace something lost or failing. Dental implants, artificial hips and knees, intraocular lenses, and pacemakers fall here. These are by far the most common, are largely uncontroversial, and are notable chiefly for how thoroughly they have been normalised: several million people receive a joint replacement each year without anyone describing them as cyborgs.

Assistive implants restore a function by translating between the world and the nervous system. The cochlear implant is the significant case, and also the most contested: it does not amplify sound but bypasses the ear entirely, stimulating the auditory nerve directly, and its widespread use in deaf children has been opposed by parts of the Deaf community on the grounds that deafness is a culture and language rather than a deficit to be corrected. This is the clearest existing example of an implant whose ethics turn on a disagreement about what counts as impairment.

Elective and augmentative implants add capability rather than restoring it. Subdermal RFID and NFC tags used to unlock doors and store data; magnets implanted in fingertips that render electromagnetic fields as a tactile sensation; Neil Harbisson's head-mounted antenna, which transposes colour frequencies into sound conducted through the skull and which he has described as an organ rather than a device.

Rejection

The body's response is the limiting factor on all of this. The foreign-body reaction — inflammation, fibrous encapsulation, infection at the point where a device crosses the skin — is the reason most experimental implants fail, and it is a materials problem before it is a design one.

The best-documented case in the art context is Wafaa Bilal's 3rd i (2010–11). The Iraqi-American artist and NYU professor had a digital camera surgically mounted to the back of his head, transmitting an image every minute for a year. Within weeks his body rejected one of the titanium posts anchoring the mount, and after antibiotics failed to resolve the infection the post was removed; he completed the project with the camera tethered instead.

Design Considerations

Implants raise problems that wearables do not. They cannot be removed at will or updated easily; they outlive the companies that made them, so a firmware defect or a discontinued service becomes a surgical matter; their security failures are physical; and consent given once must cover a device that will be present for decades. Several people have been left with non-functioning retinal or neural implants after the manufacturer ceased operations — an unusually literal case of future runoff.

Related Reading

• Brain Computer Interface
• Cyborg Animals
• Simulation and Augmentation
• Wearable Computing
• Future Runoff

External Links

• Man's body decides to reject the camera he had implanted in his head