Remotely Coupled Wireless Antenna System For Implantable Electronics

PROJECT SUMMARY: Implantable electronics can provide a direct connection to the endogenous sensorimotor pathways, can offer an exciting opportunity for intuitive and dexterous control of bionic devices. These implantable devices often need to communicate with external equipment for data acquisition and signal generation. A wired connection

between the device and external equipment is traditionally used for this type of communication, but this is fraught with surgical complications, infection, wire breakage, and device malfunction. Significant research has been devoted to wireless biotelemetry systems for implantable electronics devices and these have been

implemented in many implantable medical devices. An antenna is an essential electronic component of a wireless biotelemetry system. Antennas are typically included in or on the battery pack, thus limiting their physical size. But advanced fabrication techniques, material synthesis, and device design are shrinking the

size of next-generation devices, reducing device footprint to minimize foreign body response. Antenna design remains one of the major challenges in the miniaturization of implantable medical devices. The size of the antenna is determined by the frequency of the transmitted signal. Long-term implants use the MedRadio band

(402-405MHz), where a half-wavelength antenna is ≈6 cm in the body. Even applying methods to miniaturize these antennas, they are too large for next-generation (mm-scale) implants. Revolutionary antenna design is much needed to enable the next-generation medical implant miniaturization strategy. This proposal will use

innovative antenna system design to create a remotely coupled and injectable antenna system. This new class of implantable antenna can be injected into the body, where they transform into a soft, conductive antenna. Once the antenna is injected, it will be able to remotely coupled with a much smaller antenna in the implantable

medical device without physical attachment. This approach will enable a new class of wireless biotelemetry antennas and their associated medical applications.