CAREER:Bio-electro-photonic Microsystem Interfaces for Small Animals

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Proposal Number: ECCS - 1554367 Proposal Title: CAREER: Bio-electro-photonic Microsystem Interfaces for Small AnimalsPI Name: Bozkurt, Alper Y. Institution: North Carolina State UniversityObjective:The investigator proposes a wirelessly powered injectable capsule capable of monitoring bio-potentials and bio-photonic physiological signals including heart rate, respiration rate, oxygen saturation, pulse transit time and core body temperature. The proposed investigation includes a complete system integration and extensive evaluation. Non-technical Abstract: The emerging field of Bionic MicroSystems offers new engineering opportunities to solve real life problems. By fusing biological organisms with synthetic electronic systems, a quantum leap can be enabled in our ever-lasting engineering struggle to mimic relatively more complicated properties of biological machines, such as autonomy, intelligence, and biocomplexity observed across various length scales. This project targets to overcome major technical barrier in the way of such achievement, which is the inefficiency of state-of-art interfaces that would provide real-time information about the state of the biological organism. The proposed microsystem will open a physiological window to improve understanding of the physiology of small animals in their natural environment. The unique interdisciplinary and hands-on nature of this project will help us to reach out to all citizens"women and men, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities"and train them to use bioelectronics, biophotonics, and wearable wireless physiological systems. Further, we will design other modules including presentations, show and tell displays, and design contests. We will also use these to develop a new course and lab modules. We will engage with the public at large by means of our collaboration with local museums. In these activities, we will leverage our successful track record of media coverage by and continuing interaction with prominent national and international media agencies.Technical Abstract: Our long term goal is to enable microsystem based platforms that would perform various physiological measurements wirelessly in small animals. In doing so, we can respond to the critical need for a novel minimally invasive class of systems for continuous recording of key physiological parameters in natural environments without disturbing natural behavior. To address the challenge of higher power consumption of such systems, we will (a) benefit from the advantages of subcutaneous measurements and (b) design custom front-end circuits that would reduce power consumption through multiple strategies. To enable wireless assessment of multiple physiological parameters in ultra-miniaturized form factors, the microsystems will include state-of-the-art circuit approaches, wireless power and communication systems, and sealed packaging with extruding electrodes. The efficacy of the system will be assessed on a four platform testbed: (a) in silico using a computational model, (b) in vitro using a tissue phantom, (c) ex vivo using animal cadavers, and (d) in vivo using rat models.