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

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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.