By Andrew Liszewski

Instead of using a long pointy needle to deliver medication, which can be quite painful at times, the PharmaJet uses a high-speed liquid jet that literally blasts the medicine through your skin in less than 1/3 of a second. While the technology isn’t necessarily new, the PharmaJet improves on older designs with a sterile, single-use syringe and a spring-powered mechanism that requires no external power source besides the muscle needed to re-load it.

And since pain is a subjective feeling, the PharmaJet isn’t billed as being completely ‘pain-free’, but according to the company’s founder it feels like the equivalent of a tiny rubber band snapping against your skin. The injector, which can be reused thousands of times, currently costs about $100 while the single-use syringes run somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 cents to $1, probably closer to the latter. So they’re more expensive than traditional needles at the moment, but as production and use increases it could end up being a viable and even more cost-effective alternative to being stabbed in the arm.

[ PharmaJet Needle-Free Injector ] VIA [ CNN Money ]