How AI-Powered Implants Could Replace Opioid Painkillers

Understanding Chronic Pain & Its Challenges

Modern anesthesia and pain medications have helped alleviate what was one of medicine's most unsolvable problems: pain.

However, this is only partially true for chronic pain, which affects hundreds of millions of people globally. According to the U.S. Pain Foundation, 51.6 million Americans live with chronic pain. For over 17 million sufferers, their chronic pain is high-impact, frequently limiting their life or work activities. 

When the cause of pain is not a specific moment, but a recurring issue, it can become very hard for chemical treatment to work properly.

One problem is that the body tends to adapt to drugs, and they progressively lose efficiency, forcing patients to increase dosage over time, or suffer without a good alternative option.

Another issue is that strong painkillers are generally of the opioid class, a type of drug known to cause dependency.

Opioids are prescribed to no less than 40 million patients annually in the USA alone. Each year, they cause 85,000+ patients in acute pain to develop addiction (opioid use disorder), and 10% develop prolonged opioid use later on.

Such a level of addiction is immensely costly for society at large, estimated to represent a cost of $180B annually in the USA alone.

This is why non-opioid drugs, or non-chemical pain medications, could be a life-changing medical treatment for millions, and potentially a market worth tens of billions of dollars.

One example is Vertex Pharmaceuticals (VRTX -0.82%), with a new class of pain medication that cannot cause addiction, just approved in 2025. Fungus-derived painkillers could also be an option one day.

Researchers at the University of Southern California, National Chin-Yi University of Technology (Taiwan), the University of California, and San Diego State University are working on an implantable wireless electronic stimulator that could also help alleviate pain without any drugs.

They published their results in Nature Electronics¹, under the title “A programmable and self-adaptive ultrasonic wireless implant for personalized chronic pain management”.

How Electrical Implants Disrupt Pain Signals

At its core, pain is “just” an electric signal carried by the nerve toward the brain. Unfortunately, evolution has made this signal a very unpleasant one, and one that we simply cannot ignore. Hence, the need for drugs like opioids, which try to dull the pain signal reception in the brain.

An alternative option is to directly interfere with the electric signal itself. This is the promise of implantable electrical stimulators, which directly stimulate the spinal cord to block pain signals from reaching the brain.

Unfortunately, these devices have not seen widespread adoption due to many technical drawbacks like high cost, the need for invasive surgery, hardwired batteries, and the need for frequent battery replacements.

This is why the new device invented by the researchers, flexible and rechargeable wirelessly, is a potential game changer.

Source: Viterbi School

Piezoelectric Wireless Charging: A Game Changer

As regular battery replacement has been one of the most problematic parts of previous electrical stimulators for pain, requiring regular extra surgery, this has been the center of the researchers' work.

The idea is to convert mechanical waves into electrical signals through a phenomenon called the piezoelectric effect.

They used a miniaturized piezoelectric element made from lead zirconate titanate (PZT), a highly efficient material for converting incoming ultrasound energy into the electrical power needed for stimulation.

Ultrasound is a good option for medical devices, as they can carry energy deep within the body without causing damage.

This is a trendy idea in the space of medical devices, with another ultrasound-powered implant, for pacemakers this time, also announced by a team of Korean researchers in June 2025.

“This energy-converting type is critical for deep stimulation, as ultrasound is a non-invasive and highly penetrating energy in clinical and medical areas.

By leveraging wireless ultrasonic energy transfer and a closed-loop feedback system, this UIWI stimulator removes the necessity for bulky implanted batteries and allows for real-time, precisely adjustable pain modulation.”

Yushun Zeng – PhD Student

Using AI and Neural Networks for Pain Control

The UIWI stimulator itself is flexible, bendable, and twistable, allowing for optimal placement on the spinal cord.

Source: Viterbi School

The way it works is by using electrical stimulation to rebalance the signals that transmit and inhibit pain, effectively suppressing the sensation of pain.

Testing the devices on lab rats, the researchers successfully relieved chronic neuropathic pain caused by both mechanical stimuli and acute thermal stimuli.

What's more, the device is adaptive, regulating its “electrical treatment” according to the amount of pain actually present.

“What truly sets this device apart is its wireless, smart and self-adaptive capability for pain management.

We believe it offers great potential to replace pharmacological schemes and conventional electrical stimulation approaches, aligning with clinical needs for pain mitigation.”

Qifa Zhou – Professor of Ophthalmology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC

This was done by using a neural network called ResNet-18, and continuously monitoring brain recordings, specifically electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, which reflect a patient’s pain levels.

The neural network analyzes these brain signals and classifies pain into three distinct levels: slight pain, moderate pain, and extreme pain. This AI model boasts a 94.8% overall accuracy in distinguishing between these pain states.

Once a pain level is identified, the wearable ultrasound transmitter automatically adjusts the acoustic energy it transmits. The sonic energy gets converted into electrical energy, stimulating the spinal cord.

Source: ResearchGate

This creates a closed-loop system that provides real-time, personalized pain management.

Because the energy transmission is through infrasound, there is no need for further surgery past the initial implantation of the device around the spinal cord, and the power level can be modulated in real-time by the infrasound intensity.

“From a clinical standpoint, incorporating deep learning–based pain assessment enables dynamic interpretation and response to fluctuating pain states, which is essential for accommodating patient-specific variability.”

Chen Gong

What’s Next for AI Pain Implants?

Because the device is regulated by a neural network, it can be adapted to each patient's specific nervous system, instead of having to find a solution that matches everybody. In itself, it is a radical departure from the usual medical protocols for pain mitigation.

The next step would be to even further improve the implant design, notably making it even smaller, reducing how invasive the implantation would be. Ideally, it could one day be injected just with a syringe.

The wearable ultrasound device could also become itself wireless, or even a wearable ultrasound array patch.

Control of the system should probably be transferred to a smartphone for a commercialized version of this technology, giving a higher level of personalization and control to the patient.

Investing in HealthTech 

Koninklijke Philips N.V.

Philips is a well-known small electronics consumer brand (shavers, electric toothbrushes), equally active in healthcare. For example, it was the #1 for MedTech patent filing in Europe for 2022. It is active in connected medical products, from wearables to imaging, respirators, and medical robots.

The company is also active in semiconductors (including maglev technology) and high-tech/robotics/automation, with each activity sharing a common technological base.

Source: Philips

Philips offers wearables for cardiac, respiratory, and activity metrics. Its sensors can be integrated into smartwatches, health monitors, medical patches, and activity trackers.

Philips's expertise in biocompatible sensors, semiconductors, and wireless solutions could make it a leader in advanced medical implants with wireless charging.

For medical devices, Philips favors a partnership solution, where it develops for third parties their connected IoT (Internet of Things) medical devices fully compatible with the rest of Philips' solutions. In that context, it offers its clients prototyping, regulatory advising, end-to-end product development, and industrial-scale production.

This makes Philips a technology-focused company and a likely candidate for quickly integrating innovations into existing medical devices. In total, Philips' devices were directly affecting 1.8+ billion people.

The company wants to create a fully integrated digital healthcare environment where sensors match devices, and then use multiple connectivity solutions to integrate into the Philips HealthSuite Cloud solution and allow for in-depth data analytics.

Source: Philips

As a MedTech industry supplier, often manufacturing for other brands, Philips is not as visible in the sector as other, more prominent companies. However, it is an expert in building high-performance electronic devices and sensors, often pushing the boundaries of what's possible in its niche in healthcare and wearables.

With wearables and medical electronics increasingly integrated into healthcare and medical protocols, Philips's Healthcare segment will likely grow as part of the conglomerate.

Latest Koninklijke Philips N.V. (PHG) Stock News and Developments

Study Referenced

^{1. Zeng, Y., Gong, C., Lu, G. et al. A programmable and self-adaptive ultrasonic wireless implant for personalized chronic pain management. Nature Electronics 8, 437–449 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-025-01374-6}