They want to use the human skeleton to transmit commands reliably and securely to wearable gadgets and medical implants.

Wireless radio signals are already used to control gadgets and implants, but these can suffer interference from Wi-Fi and other sources. This makes them unreliable and, in the case of medical implants, potentially dangerous.

So the Rice team decided to investigate using sound instead of radio waves. Bone is known to be a great conductor of sound

The researchers suggest applications such as a vibrator in a wrist receiver/transmitter that could tell an implant placed near a bone to release a drug dose, with the implant then sending back data from its sensors.

"All data transfer is contained inside the human body, and it can only be retrieved through direct physical contact,"