Secure and Reliable In-body Backscatter

Medical implants collect vital information about patients´ health status, perform targeted drug delivery and replace non-functioning organs with artificial ones.

As the population ages and an increasingly large number of people suffer from multiple diseases, we expect the number of patients with several medical implants to increase rapidly.

While today these implants operate independently, networking them enables novel applications such as distributed control loops where implants sense critical parameters in one part of the body to control drug delivery in other parts.

We have recently pioneered a novel approach of radio-frequency based communication through fat tissue to network implants.

Our approach enables higher data rates than conventional methods for in-body communication making novel applications such as brain-to-machine interfaces possible.

Networking devices in the body, however, requires energy for communication and in particular to generate the radio waves for wireless transmissions.

Backscatter communication avoids this by outsourcing the radio wave generation to an external device that is, e.g.,  easier to access and recharge.

There are, however, two major challenges to make this energy-efficient communication technology viable and applicable in the challenging environment of a human body: reliability since the backscattered signals are inherently weak and security because of the resource-constraints that make, e.g., authentication challenging.