In-vivo Network of Sensors and Actuators

TL;DR

This paper proposes a peer-to-peer in-vivo network of miniaturized sensors and actuators that communicate via optical electromagnetic waves, enabling cell-level sensing and actuation for advanced biological therapies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel in-vivo sensor/actuator network using optical communication suitable for cell-sized devices, surpassing RFID and WSN in size and speed.

Findings

Suitable for cell-level sensing and actuation

Supports direct peer-to-peer communication

Optimized for size, speed, and collision avoidance

Abstract

An advanced system of sensors/actuators should allow the direct feedback of a sensed signal into an actuation, e.g., an action potential propagation through an axon or a special cell activity might be sensed and suppressed by an actuator through voltage stimulation or chemical delivery. Such a complex procedure of sensing and stimulation calls for direct communication among these sensors and actuators. In addition, minimizing the sensor/actuator to the size of a biological cell can enable the cell-level automatic therapy. For this objective, we propose such an approach to form a peer-to-peer network of \emph{in vivo} sensors/actuators (S/As) that can be deployed with or even inside biological cells. The S/As can communicate with each other via electromagnetic waves of optical frequencies. In comparison with the comparable techniques including the radio-frequency identification (RFID) and the wireless sensor network (WSN), this technique is well adapted for the cell-level sensing-actuating tasks considering the requirements on size, actuation speed, signal-collision avoidance, etc.