Challenges of wireless medical implant technologies for future health monitoring and treatment

Summary form only given. There is great interest in using emerging wireless technologies to support remote patient monitoring in an unobtrusive, reliable and cost effective manner thereby providing personalized sustainable services to patients. Medical Body Area Networks (MBANs) is one such emerging technology that has the potential to significantly improve health care delivery, diagnostic monitoring, disease-tracking and related medical procedures. MBANs need to provide highly reliable and low power communications for medical devices, especially those implanted in the human body. In this presentation we provide an overview of research activities around the world aiming into MBANs and associated technologies. We also describe our research into MBANS that focuses on medical implant applications. This research covers interference mitigation, channel modeling, medium access control protocols and experimental platforms development. Effective radio interference mitigation is crucial to achieving highly reliable and low power operation for implant communications. Interference can be caused by legacy systems that operate in the same frequency bands or by other MBANs operating at the same frequency and in the same location. Radio interference issues must be therefore well understood and interference mitigation algorithms and techniques must be effectively supported by emerging protocols. Our research in this area includes investigation of interference mitigation methods based on game theoretic approaches. An experimental platform for in-body applications in the 400 MHz MICS band has also been developed and used for channel measurements and modeling. An UWB experimental platform for in-body applications is currently under development to provide a highly-reconfigurable and power efficient operation.