Towards flexible wireless charging for medical implants using distributed antenna system

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of In-N-Out, a software-hardware solution for far-field wireless power transfer. In-N-Out can continuously charge a medical implant residing in deep tissues at near-optimal beamforming power, even when the implant moves around inside the human body. To accomplish this, we exploit the unique energy ball pattern of distributed antenna array and devise a backscatter-assisted beamforming algorithm that can concentrate RF energy on a tiny spot surrounding the medical implant. Meanwhile, the power levels on other body parts stay in low level, reducing the risk of overheating. We prototype In-N-Out on 21 software-defined radios and a printed circuit board (PCB). Extensive experiments demonstrate that In-N-Out achieves 0.37 mW average charging power inside a 10 cm-thick pork belly, which is sufficient to wirelessly power a range of commercial medical devices. Our head-to-head comparison with the state-of-the-art approach shows that In-N-Out achieves 5.4×-18.1× power gain when the implant is stationary, and 5.3×-7.4× power gain when the implant is in motion.

• Hardware → Wireless devices; Bio-embedded electronics; Platform power issues; • Networks → Wireless access points, base stations and infrastructure.