Bioelectronic Sensor Nodes for Internet of Bodies

TL;DR

This paper reviews the challenges and opportunities in designing energy-efficient, secure bio-sensor nodes for the Internet of Bodies, focusing on sensing, communication, and power harvesting techniques to enable continuous health monitoring.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis and comparison of sensing mechanisms, communication modalities, and powering techniques for low-power, secure bio-sensors in IoB applications.

Findings

Comparison of voltage/current vs time-domain sensing

Evaluation of wireless and human-body communication methods

Analysis of energy harvesting techniques for wearable and implantable devices

Abstract

Energy-efficient sensing with Physically-secure communication for bio-sensors on, around and within the Human Body is a major area of research today for development of low-cost healthcare, enabling continuous monitoring and/or secure, perpetual operation. These devices, when used as a network of nodes form the Internet of Bodies (IoB), which poses certain challenges including stringent resource constraints (power/area/computation/memory), simultaneous sensing and communication, and security vulnerabilities as evidenced by the DHS and FDA advisories. One other major challenge is to find an efficient on-body energy harvesting method to support the sensing, communication, and security sub-modules. Due to the limitations in the harvested amount of energy, we require reduction of energy consumed per unit information, making the use of in-sensor analytics/processing imperative. In this paper, we review the challenges and opportunities in low-power sensing, processing and communication, with possible powering modalities for future bio-sensor nodes. Specifically, we analyze, compare and contrast (a) different sensing mechanisms such as voltage/current domain vs time-domain, (b) low-power, secure communication modalities including wireless techniques and human-body communication, and (c) different powering techniques for both wearable devices and implants.