Antenna operating frequency selection for energy harvesting on nano biomedical devices

Biomedical devices are becoming smaller and smaller, creating many new solutions for the current challenges in medical diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring. These solutions, such as drug delivery systems, may rely on miniaturized devices that are placed inside the body while controlled from outside via wireless communications. Due to the high degree of system miniaturization, the wireless link must also use a very small antenna, pushing the communication range to high frequencies. However, since human body tissue attenuation increases with frequency [1], it is challenging to obtain an efficient link. In this paper we show that when the device dimension is constrained, the received power is higher at lower operating frequencies despite the low antenna efficiency.