IEEE SpectrumLast year’s most popular biomedical stories focused on both the integration of new technologies and the revamping of old ones. While AI is all the rage in most industries, including biomedical, with applications like a brain alert system for deteriorating mental health and a model to estimate heart rate in real time, biomedical news over the past year has also focused on existing technologies. Technology like Wi-Fi, ultrasound and lasers have all made a comeback or found new uses in 2025.
Whether the innovation comes from new or old technology, IEEE Spectrum will continue to cover it rigorously in 2026.
Georgia Institute of Technology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and TeraPixel
When Patricio Riva Posse, a psychiatrist at Emory University School of Medicine, realized that his patient’s brain implants were sending her signals that her depression was getting worse before she even realized anything was wrong, he wished he could have acted sooner.
This experience led him and his colleagues to develop “an automatic alarm system” to detect signs of changing mental health. The tool monitors brain signals in real time, using implants to record electrical impulses and AI to analyze the signals and flag warning signs of relapse. Other research groups in the United States are experimenting with different ways to use these stimulating brain implants to help treat depression, with or without the help of AI. “There are so many levers we can pull here,” says neurosurgeon Nir Lipsman in the article.
Dmitry Kireev/University of Massachusetts Amherst
In Dmitry Kireev’s lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, researchers are developing imperceptibly thin graphene tattoos that can monitor your vital signs and more. “Electronic tattoos could help people track complex diseases, including cardiovascular, metabolic, immune, and neurodegenerative diseases. Nearly half of American adults could be in the early stages of one or more of these disorders right now, even if they don’t know it yet,” he wrote in an article for IEEE Spectrum.
How does it work? Graphene is conductive, strong and flexible, capable of measuring characteristics such as heart rate and the presence of certain compounds in sweat. For now, the tattoos must be plugged into a conventional electronic circuit, but Kireev hopes they will soon be integrated into smart watches, and therefore easier to wear.
Erika Cardema/UC Santa Cruz
Wi-Fi can do more than just connect you to the Internet: it can help you monitor your heart inexpensively and without requiring constant physical contact. The new approach, called Pulse-Fi, uses an AI model to analyze heartbeats to estimate heart rate in real time from up to 10 feet away.
The system is inexpensive, totaling approximately US$40, easy to deploy, and does not introduce discomfort. It also works regardless of the user’s posture and in all types of environments. Katia Obraczka, a computer scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who led the development of Pulse-Fi, says the team plans to commercialize the technology.
advanced age
Sangeeta S. Chavan and Stavros Zanos, biomedical researchers at the Institute for Bioelectronic Medicine in New York, hypothesize that ultrasound waves could activate neurons, providing “a precise and safe way to deliver curative treatments for a wide range of acute and chronic diseases,” as they write in an article for Spectrum. Targeted ultrasound could then be used as a treatment for inflammation or diabetes, instead of drugs with many side effects, they say.
It works by vibrating a neuron’s membrane and “opening channels that allow ions to flow into the cell, thereby indirectly changing the cell’s voltage and causing it to light up,” they write. The authors believe that activating specific neurons can help address the root causes of specific diseases.
Extreme Light Group/University of Glasgow
If a doctor wants to see inside your head, they have to decide whether they want to do it cheaply or in depth: an electroencephalograph is inexpensive, but doesn’t penetrate beyond the outer layers of the brain, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is expensive, but can see all the way through. Shining a laser through a person’s head appears to be the first step toward technology that accomplishes both.
For many years, this kind of work seemed impossible due to the human head’s ability to block light, but researchers have now proven that lasers can send photons through the entire body. “What was thought to be impossible, we have shown is possible. And we hope this could inspire the next generation of these devices,” says project leader Jack Radford in the article.
Jiawei Ge
In the not-so-distant future, surgical patients may hear “The robot will see you now,” as the authors of this story suggest. The three researchers work at the Johns Hopkins University Robotics Lab developing the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), which performed the first autonomous soft tissue surgery in a living animal in 2016.
While there certainly remain challenges to bringing autonomous robots into the operating room, such as developing general-purpose robotic controllers and collecting data under strict privacy regulations, the end goal is on the horizon. “A scenario in which patients are routinely greeted by a surgeon and an autonomous robotic assistant is no longer a remote possibility,” the authors write.
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