Published July 7, 2025 | Version v1
Preprint Open

Preprint for Autonomous Implants

  • 1. New Technologies – Research Centre (NTC), University of West Bohemia, Univerzitní 8, 301 00 Pilsen, Czech Republic
  • 2. Department of Biomaterials, Institute of Clinical Sciences, Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
  • 3. School of Health and Life Sciences, Dentistry Department, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Porto Alegre, Brazil
  • 4. Department of Stomatology, The Fourth Military Medical University, Beijing 100142, China
  • 5. Department of Engineering, School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK
  • 6. Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering (IQ), College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.

Description

With the increasing ageing population, more implants are being used in the body. However, these implants often fail, and they suffer from lack of integration or providing proper function. There have been efforts to empower implants by employing bioactive materials, adding cellular components and integrating smart characteristics such as self-healing properties. The vision is though, to develop an implant that can mimic native tissues in their way of doing things, responding to challenges and remodeling. Such automated implants require the integration of advances made in various fields of science. Although early, there are good steps taken along this way, e g. the development of stimuli-responsive, self-powering, self-actuating, self-healing, self-regenerating, self-aware implants. Attempts to combine more than one smart property into these implants are still at the beginning, e.g. the integration of such special characteristic requires a new set of skills and thinking, and it brings with it new challenges that warrant exploring and investment. Such an implant evolution is expected to be in stages where the first implant will be able to communicate with doctors and hospitals, then in the next stage with patients and later they will be independent, sense any disturbances and aberrations from normal early on and correct self before damage becomes irreversible. In this forward-looking review, we look at research done so far in this direction and efforts to assemble individual aspects of smart implants into a multifunctional implant of the future. We critically review the stages of material, in vitro, in vivo testing and clinical application if any. In addition, we discuss challenges facing the development of autonomous smart implants and suggest research directions and ideas.  

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Additional details

Related works

Is part of
Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.15828250 (DOI)
Is supplement to
Publication: 10.1002/adma.202510702 (DOI)

Funding

European Union
Operational Programme Johanes Amos Comenius, call Excellent Research, co funded by the European Union, administered by the Ministry of Education, Sports and Youth CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004634
National Institutes of Health
1UG3TR003148-01