“This is the first time someone has used ultrasound as a method of powering and communicating with extremely small implantable systems,” one of the paper’s authors, Donjon Seo, told Scientific American. “This opens up a host of applications in terms of embodied telemetry: being able to put something super-tiny, super-deep in the body, which you can park next to a nerve, organ, muscle or gastrointestinal tract, and read data out wirelessly.”