Wireless medical implant: A case study on artificial pancreas

Medical implants are devices manufactured to replace damaged biological organs or structures. Once implanted, these devices communicate with other devices outside the body wirelessly. In this paper, we present our work on a particular type of WMI (wireless medical implants): artificial pancreas. We investigate challenges and issues in the context of artificial pancreas designs. In particular, we focus on how to achieve a low power design for WMI and propose a Virtual Patient system to evaluate control algorithms and communication protocols without an actual implantation of the device. Simulation and experiment results presented in this paper serves as design guidelines for wireless medical implant development.