The past few years have witnessed a growing interest in wireless and batteryless implants,
due to their potential in long-term biomedical monitoring of in-body conditions such as internal organ movements, bladder pressure, and gastrointestinal health. Early proposals for batteryless implants relied on inductive near-field coupling and ultrasound harvesting, which require direct contact between the external power source and the human body. To overcome this near-field challenge, recent research has investigated the use of RF backscatter in wireless micro-implants because of its ability to communicate with wireless receivers that are placed at a distance outside the body (∼0.5 m), allowing a more seamless user experience.
Unfortunately, existing far-field backscatter designs remain limited in their functionality: they cannot perform biometric sensing or secure data transmission; they also suffer from degraded harvesting efficiency and backscatter range due to the impact of variations in the surrounding tissues. In this paper, we present the design of a batteryless, wireless and secure system-on-chip (SoC) implant for in-body strain sensing. The SoC relies on four features: 1) employing a reconfigurable in-body rectenna which can operate across tissues adapting its backscatter bandwidth and center frequency; 2) designing an energy efficient 1.37 mmHg strain sensing front-end with an efficiency of 5.9 mmHg·nJ/conversion;
3) incorporating an AES-GCM security engine to ensure the authenticity and confidentiality of sensed data while sharing the ADC with the sensor interface for an area efficient random number generation; 4) implementing an over-the-air closed-loop wireless programming scheme to reprogram the RF front-end to adapt for surrounding tissues and the sensor front-end to achieve faster settling times below 2 s.
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Wireless, Batteryless, and Secure Implantable System-on-a-Chip for 1.37mmHg Strain Sensing with Bandwidth Reconfigurability for Cross-Tissue Adaptation
There is a growing interest in wireless and batteryless implants for
long-term sensing of organ movements, core pressure, glucose
levels, or other biometrics [1]. Most research on such implants has
focused on ultrasonic [2] and nearfield inductive [3-4] methods for
power and communication, which require direct contact or close
proximity (<1-5cm) to the human body. Recently, RF backscatter has
emerged as a promising alternative due to its ability to communicate
with far-field (> 10cm) wireless devices at ultra-low-power [5]. While
multiple proposals have demonstrated far-field RF backscatter in
deep tissues, these proposals have been limited to tag identification
and could neither perform biometric sensing nor secure the wireless
communication links, which is critical for ensuring the confidentiality
of the sensed biometrics and for responding to commands only from
authorized users [6]. Moreover, such far-field RF implants are
susceptible to tissue variations which impact their resonance and
hence their efficiency in RF backscatter and energy harvesting.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1844280
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10393538
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 2
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/CICC53496.2022.9772815
