Presentation Videos

Healthcare technology was fast developing in the past decade, thanks to the advancement of connected wearable sensors, e.g., smart watches, glucose monitors. However, wearables are primarily limited by their precision, due to an unstable skin contact condition. Implantable sensors, on the other hand, are precise, but are often invasive and have higher risk of complication. With the recent advancement in minimally-invasive (e.g., catheter-based) surgeries, insertable sensors can greatly reduce pain, length of hospital stays and possible long-term complications arising from interconnect penetrating tissue. In this talk, I will provide an introduction to next-generation minimally-invasive implantable/insertable sensors, and how wireless integrated circuits can become a crucial component of the sensing system. This talk will start with an introduction of several propagation modalities adopted for in-body communication, including inductive- and capacitive-(/conductive-) coupling, ultrasound and EM radiation. The second part of the talk will discuss the fundamental trade-offs between energy efficiency and volume of the transceivers. Finally, this talk will end with examples of minimally invasive wireless technology for intra-cortical brain computer interfaces, and a discussion of future circuit design challenges yet to be tackled.

Introduction video about the ground-breaking research project - Intranet of Neurons - funded by European Research Council, related to high-capacity wireless telemetry network for implantable brain-computer interfaces.

“Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe” - Prof. M. Kaku. The human brain has up to 80 billion of neurons, which is similar to the number of planets in our Galaxy. It gives us a feeling that we are an independent and unique individual, but we have very little idea how the brain functions. Many neural sensing technologies, mostly imaging, have been developed for scientific or therapeutic purposes. With the advancement in semiconductor technology, silicon-based intra-cortical micro-electrode arrays (MEAs) enable electrical sensing with sub-millisecond temporal resolution and 10’s of µm spatial resolution. They have become the most widely adopted method in neurotherapeutics or neuroscience experiments at the moment. However, there are still many challenges yet to be overcome. For instance, high channel count of neural sensing with high temporal resolution produces a huge amount of data, and they need to be wirelessly transferred across tissues without introducing heating. However, such brain implants should be highly miniature to minimize the surgical invasiveness, so they have very limited resource to support energy-consuming wireless transmission. In this plenary talk, we will discuss how neuromorphic technology inspired from our brains can be a potential solution for future brain-computer interfaces.