BodyTalks: Connecting in-body nano communication with body area networks (NaBoCom II)

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Research and development on sensor networks and body area networks (BANs) has gained increased maturity in recent years. Yet, in-body nanonetworks built from nanodevices still represent a new and fascinating direction of research, extending upon and going well beyond sensor networks. The vision is that nanodevices (nanoscale devices), for example, patrol the body, take measurements wherever necessary, and report collected data to the outside. Even better, these machines may immediately work on problems they detect within the body, such as cancer cells, arteriosclerosis, or HI viruses. All this is conducive to reach the ultimate goal of nanonetwork research: medical applications allowing early detection and mitigation of diseases. Precision medicine represents a paradigm shift in medicine, from the traditional, very generalized approach to the treatment of a disease to a strategy for the prevention, diagnosis and therapy of diseases based on a person’s unique characteristics. Nano technologies are more and more considered to be an important part of the implementation; although networked nanosensors are hardly discussed here yet. The overall goal of this project is to explore fundamental limits and new insights on how to connect in-body nanonetworks with body area networks in order to establish a basis for a wide variety of such integrated precision medicine applications. It is designed to run over a six-year period. In the first 24-month funding period, we, in order to pave the way towards this vision, concentrated on a general architecture for such systems and a number of basic building blocks for the technical interconnection of nanonetworks and medical BANs, namely naming and addressing, location-based diffusion, reliability and time bounds, and tool support for simulation. In this second 24-month funding period, we want to dig deeper into several communication aspects of in-body nano communications, especially channel characterization for short-range nano communication, information flow through the human circulatory system, and localization of nano systems within the body. These blocks are supported by further work on integrated simulation-based performance evaluation. In addition, we aim to also initiate closer collaborations with colleagues in medical and life sciences to identify possible ways to turn the investigated nanonetworks into a strong building block for next generation precision medicine applications.