The shocking tooth about mobiles

Two students from the Royal College of Art have developed a mobile phone that fits inside a tooth.

The device, which picks up signals with a radio receiver and uses a tiny vibrating plate to convey them as sound along the jawbone to a person's ear, was developed by graduates James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau. The phone could be implanted in a tooth during routine dental surgery.

The prototype is part of the Royal College of Art's annual Summer Exhibition, which displays the latest ideas from the college's designers and students.

The tooth phone lacks the communications chip to actually turn it into a functioning device, but its designers said that the technology already existed and would be simple to build into the gadget.

If it became a working device, stock traders could receive up-to-the-minute information about share prices, and football managers could communicate quickly with players during key matches.

But the main aim of the exhibit is to spark a debate among people about the concept of wearable computers.