Medical monitoring and diagnostics using ingestible capsule antennas: An exciting paradigm in bio-telemetry

Technological advancement over the past decade has enabled the use of smart capsules (electronic digestible pills) in biomedical applications. These systems help in the treatment and diagnosis of various diseases (GI tract diseases). This paper presents ingestible capsule antenna designs for smart pill systems suitable for medical monitoring and diagnostic applications in the exciting field of bio-telemetry. Firstly, an RFID bio-capsule tag is proposed for medicine monitoring purposes. The design of the tag is based on concept of inductive feed loop coupled to conformal meandered dipole. The tag performance is evaluated inside the human body in terms of impedance, radiation pattern and power reflection characteristics. The unique tag design matches to the chip impedance only when the tag is inside the human body. In the second part, a novel conformal planar offset meandered dipole capsule antenna is proposed for medical diagnostic procedures. The antenna performance is evaluated by studying the impedance, radiation, polarization and return loss characteristics inside the human body model. A link budget is evaluated to ensure successful and robust wireless telemetry.