CAREER: Ultrasonically-Powered Smart Medical Implants for Monitoring and Modulating Local Physiology

这个CAREER项目集成了研究，教育和推广组件，以克服当前的科学限制，实现有效的智能电子传感器小型化。主要的社会效益将在医疗保健领域实现，医疗芯片可以植入人脑或心脏组织，以诊断和治疗患有身体，神经和心理残疾和疾病的患者。通过实现大规模的神经调节，微型传感器可以为阿尔茨海默氏症、记忆丧失或疼痛管理等神经系统疾病提供新的解决方案。该项目的多方面教育计划将包括课堂和在线教学和推广，以教育广泛的国际学者，学生和公众有关该项目的研究理论，设计和实验。来自代表性不足群体的高中生将参加实验室研究，并将开发一个在线开放课程，向更大的社区广泛传播研究结果。将利用新兴的在线教学平台和技术。缩小尺寸对于各种下一代智能传感器应用至关重要，包括可以监测和调节局部生理机能、诊断和治疗残疾和疾病的医疗植入物。当前的方法不能向毫米（mm）或亚毫米尺度传感器提供足够的功率，并且功能上可接受的传感器对于其预期应用来说太大，或者如果按比例缩放，则具有极其有限的操作能力和范围。这些局限性是根本性的，同样的技术和方法的进一步优化无法满足应用需求。该研究项目试图通过使用超声波范围内的声波来克服这些局限性-一种用于植入式设备的新无线功率传输技术，以大幅提高整体效率，传感器尺寸和操作深度。

This CAREER project integrates research, educational, and outreach components to overcome current scientific limitations to achieving effective smart electronic sensor miniaturization. The main societal benefits will be realized in the healthcare sector, where a medical chip can be implanted in the human brain or heart tissue to diagnose and treat patients with physical, neurological and psychological disabilities and diseases. By enabling large-scale neuro-modulation, the miniaturized sensor could lead to new solutions for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's, memory loss or pain management. The project's multi-faceted educational plan will incorporate class and online teaching and outreach to educate a broad international audience of academics, students, and the general public about the project's research theories, designs and experiments. High school students from underrepresented groups will participate in laboratory research, and an online, open-access course will be developed to broadly disseminate results to the larger community. Emerging online teaching and learning platforms and techniques will be utilized. TechnicalSensor size reduction is essential for a variety of next generation smart sensor applications including medical implants that can monitor and modulate local physiology, and diagnose and treat disabilities and diseases. Current methodologies cannot deliver sufficient power to millimeter (mm) or sub-mm scale sensors, and functionally-acceptable sensors are either too large for their intended application or, if scaled, have extremely limited operational capability and range. These limitations are fundamental, and further optimization of the same techniques and methodologies cannot meet application requirements.The research project seeks to overcome those limitations by using acoustic waves in the ultrasonic range - a new wireless power delivery technique for implantable devices to substantially improve the overall efficiency, sensor dimensions and depth of operation.