Communication inside the body among implanted devices

What is it about?

Implanted sensors will foster next generation healthcare by allowing real time physiological monitoring, proactive drug delivery and personalized medicine. Intra-body network concept enable the interconnection of implants among them, as well as allows them to transmit the sensed measurements to an external monitoring center for processing, in order to receive updates on the amount of drug delivery and to send commands to embedded actuators. In this work, the energy efficient galvanic coupling technology is used to send electromyography data (i. e., neuro-muscular signals recorded at muscle level) through intra-body links. Real electromyography data are first acquired and recorded with needle electrodes inserted in the muscle of a person’s forearm. Then, the data are transferred via galvanic coupling intra-body communication to another location in the body through the developed platform achieving almost error-free performance in both ex-vivo and in-vivo tests. Several medical applications are envisioned for the proposed system, such as the scenario where signals sensed from a healthy muscle are transmitted to a close one that is unable to receive natural input signals due to a nerve compression.

Featured Image

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Extensive experiments are conducted to transfer the acquired real electromyography data via intra-body link in both ex-vivo chicken and in-vivo human tissue under different environmental conditions. The significance of this experimental study is that we are able to achieve almost error free communication, hence a reliable and robust communication, which is an important result in medical applications.

Perspectives