A Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) led team has developed a simple "coat of armor" to encase small batteries, rendering¹ them harmless if they are ever swallowed. Children, particularly infants and young toddlers, can ingest these batteries, leading to serious damage to their esophagus as well as other gut² tissue, and sometimes, death. Such incidents are on the rise, yet up until now, no solutions have been directed at the battery itself. The new work, published online November 3, 2014 in the Proceedings³ of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a simple, cost-effective fix that if implemented⁴, could dramatically reduce if not eliminate, this unfortunate problem. "To date, there has been no innovation to address this issue with small batteries," says Jeff Karp, PhD, BWH Division of Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Stem Cell Institute. "To address this challenge we sought to develop something that would render the battery inert⁵, specifically when it was outside of a device."

 

Each year, roughly 5 billion "button" batteries are produced across the world. These small, disc-shaped batteries power everything from children's toys, hearing aids and laser pointers to remote controls and musical greeting cards. While recent legislation requires battery compartments⁶ in children's toys to be secured with screws, many items commonly used by adults contain these batteries in easily accessible formats⁷ and their packaging provides no protection. With the proliferation of such gadgets⁸, and the demand for ever-powerful batteries to power them, the problem of accidental ingestion is increasing. In 2013, there were more than 3,000 reported cases of accidental battery ingestion -- the majority in children under age 6.

 

"Ingested disc batteries require emergent removal from the esophagus," says co-first study author Giovanni Traverso, MB, BCh, PhD, a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a researcher at MIT. "The swallowing of these batteries is a gastrointestinal emergency given that tissue damage starts as soon as the battery is in contact with the tissue, generating an electric current and leading to a chemical burn."

 

Karp and his colleagues became aware of this issue in 2010, and decided⁹ to apply their collective expertise¹⁰ toward developing a novel solution. "This seemed like a tractable¹¹ problem that we could make significant headway on in a short period of time, just based on our expertise in materials and devices," says Karp.

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