PHd Thesis

3. GNU radio with ferrite coil antenna Antenna with air as surrounding

4. Working in FPGA board which operates low-power listening mode; Here nodes sleep most of the time and wake-up only at the time of transmission/reception

Motivation:

Chronic diseases are on a rapid rise throughout the world due to rapidly aging popula-tion in developed countries and increasing air, water and food pollution in developing countries. In the US, approximately 45%, or 133 million, of all Americans suffer from at least one chronic disease, and the number is growing. Furthermore, persistent conditions are the nation’s leading cause of death and disability. According to the US CDC, chronic diseases account for nearly 75% of aggregate healthcare spending, and their treatment accounts for 96% of Medicare costs and 83% of Medicaid costs.

Furthermore, 25% of US adults have ≥ 2 chronic conditions and more than 50% of older adults ≥ 3 chronic conditions. Since the likelihood of multiple chronic conditions increases as people age, the rapidly aging population argues for a concerted effort in prevention and management of chronic diseases.

An effective management of many chronic diseases requires long-term and continu-ous observation, which concerns two aspects: (a) Monitoring of disease related parameters and corresponding automated actuators to deliver medicine or physiologi- cal stimulation, and (b) Monitoring of physiological health parameters that are used by doctors to recommend specific actions (e.g., change in medication, avoidance of certain foods, etc.). In some chronic diseases or deficiencies in natural function of the organ, implanting multiple sensors and actuators inside the body can enable the unprecedented management, e.g., overactive bladder control by a spinal cord neuromodulator based on the bladder pressure monitoring by an implantable pressure sensor and the urine volume monitoring by microelectrodes-mediated neural recording; effective pacemaker control via pH, oxygen, respiration, activity, and drug infusion monitoring; or brain-computer interface via implantable microelectrode array (number of channels can be more than 100).

With multiple chronic diseases in older people and the need for multiple sensors, actuators and decision nodes per disease, there is a real need to explore intrabody networks that can operate reliably and unattended over long periods with harvested energy. We address this need by exploring networks that can simultaneously harvest/transfer energy and communicate in the very difficult intrabody environment and test them in both simulated media and limited live animal tissue. This can be used in the application of endoscopy, where TX is in your hand and RX close to the mouth to get the picture of whole body. We expect this research to pave the way for potential commercial development and clinical trials that we do not do here.