Communication and energy delivery architectures for personal medical devices
Name
818241822-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
32.77 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6c7cdecdfc1d75137d18e5fbcd545763
Author(s)
Mercier, Patrick Philip
Advisor(s)
Anantha P. Chandrakasan.
Date Issued
2012
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Advances in sensor technologies and integrated electronics are revolutionizing how humans access and receive healthcare. However, many envisioned wearable or implantable systems are not deployable in practice due to high energy consumption and anatomically-limited size constraints, necessitating large form-factors for external devices, or eventual surgical re-implantation procedures for in-vivo applications. Since communication and energy-management sub-systems often dominate the power budgets of personal biomedical devices, this thesis explores alternative usecases, system architectures, and circuit solutions to reduce their energy burden. For wearable applications, a system-on-chip is designed that both communicates and delivers power over an eTextiles network. The transmitter and receiver front-ends are at least an order of magnitude more efficient than conventional body-area networks. For implantable applications, two separate systems are proposed that avoid reimplantation requirements. The first system extracts energy from the endocochlear potential, an electrochemical gradient found naturally within the inner-ear of mammals, in order to power a wireless sensor. Since extractable energy levels are limited, novel sensing, communication, and energy management solutions are proposed that leverage duty-cycling to achieve enabling power consumptions that are at least an order of magnitude lower than previous work. Clinical measurements show the first system demonstrated to sustain itself with a mammalian-generated electrochemical potential operating as the only source of energy into the system. The second system leverages the essentially unlimited number of re-charge cycles offered by ultracapacitors. To ease patient usability, a rapid wireless capacitor charging architecture is proposed that employs a multi-tapped secondary inductive coil to provide charging times that are significantly faster than conventional approaches.
Description
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-232).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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