If you take a lot of medications, trips to the pharmacy and popping pills may soon be history. Instead of relying on the patient to take the correct medications, this tiny implanted pharmacy can be programmed to deliver drugs automatically in the right doses at the right times.

The implanted chip has dozens of sealed microreservoirs, each containing a concentrated dose of medicine. At the proper time, a tiny electrical current is applied to the seal of a reservoir, allowing the medicine to flow directly into the patient's bloodstream. The implant can hold several different medications simultaneously, allowing complicated drug regimens to be followed with total accuracy.

Best of all, the implant can be controlled wirelessly, allowing the Doctor to change dosage or the timing of doses at any time. The changes can even be made remotely by phone or computer, communicating with the implant over a secure radio band called the Medical Implant Communications Service.

The device is currently being tested on osteoporosis patients in Denmark. The normal therapy requires daily injections of a potent medication, but many of the elderly patients don't like the shots and give up on the treatment. With the implants, the patients get the correct doses without the painful daily shots.

This sounds amazing, but I sure hope that radio band really is as secure as they claim. If it could be hacked, the potential for abuse is not hard to imagine. At least it doesn't sound quite so Buck Rogers as those medicine firing microrockets we saw last month.

Via PopSci