Energy Efficiency and Reliability in Wireless Biomedical Implant Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-efficient and reliable physical layer protocol for wireless biomedical implants using rateless codes and FSK modulation, significantly reducing power consumption and improving signal reliability in body tissues.

Contribution

It introduces an augmentation protocol with rateless coding and FSK modulation for MICS, enhancing energy efficiency and reliability in implantable medical devices.

Findings

Achieves 80% energy savings over IEEE 802.15.4 standard.

Rateless coded FSK outperforms uncoded FSK in deep tissue applications.

Provides fast start-up time for implant transceivers.

Abstract

The use of wireless implant technology requires correct delivery of the vital physiological signs of the patient along with the energy management in power-constrained devices. Toward these goals, we present an augmentation protocol for the physical layer of the Medical Implant Communications Service (MICS) with focus on the energy efficiency of deployed devices over the MICS frequency band. The present protocol uses the rateless code with the Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) modulation scheme to overcome the reliability and power cost concerns in tiny implantable sensors due to the considerable attenuation of propagated signals across the human body. In addition, the protocol allows a fast start-up time for the transceiver circuitry. The main advantage of using rateless codes is to provide an inherent adaptive duty-cycling for power management, due to the flexibility of the rateless code rate. Analytical results demonstrate that an 80% energy saving is achievable with the proposed protocol when compared to the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer standard with the same structure used for wireless sensor networks. Numerical results show that the optimized rateless coded FSK is more energy efficient than that of the uncoded FSK scheme for deep tissue (e.g., digestive endoscopy) applications, where the optimization is performed over modulation and coding parameters.