Wakeup transmitters for emergency situations in medical implants: A UWB solution

Medical implants operate on a tight power budget and have very low latency communication requirements. To reduce power consumption, medical implants typically contain an additional radio, called wakeup receiver (WURX). WURX is an ultra low power receiver and it monitors the channel for “start of communication” command. To further scale down the power consumption, WURX is heavily duty cycled which causes latency and in turn adversely affects the alarm situations where immediate communication is required. This paper proposes a new scheme i.e. use of UWB as “wake up transmitter”(WUTX) radio in medical implants. We show that the new scheme enables the implant to initiate communication under alarm situations, with very low latency with the base-station, a key improvement which was thus far not possible with the conventional WURX enabled medical implant radios. We carry out a power and link budget analysis of this UWB-TX to show that the proposed scheme imposes a very low energy overhead and permits operation inside human tissue.