CAREER: Reliable and Secure Minimally Invasive Bioelectronic Implants through Contextual Awareness

无线、无电池、微创(WBMI)生物电子技术有望为人类健康和福祉带来大量变革性的临床和科学应用。这一职业项目旨在研究和解决WBMI生物电子器件中关键但在很大程度上被忽视的可靠性和安全挑战。考虑到这些设备的极端功率和尺寸限制，可靠性和安全保护不能是事后的想法，必须以基本的生物电子功能进行整体设计。该项目将调查和创建理论基础，以及实际的硬件和系统实现，以应对可靠和安全的WBMI生物电子植入物的三个关键挑战。挑战包括安全、高效和可靠的无线电力传输，远程医疗和紧急情况下的安全访问和通信，以及在长时间运行期间实时监控潜在故障或攻击。该项目的研究成果将是一个独一无二的硬件平台，加速研究和开发用于临床前和临床应用的实用可靠和安全的植入式生物电子系统。与此同时，该项目的目标是通过吸引和教育研究生、大学生和高中生，特别是代表不足的少数族裔，来加强半导体硬件劳动力。这个高度跨学科的项目横跨材料、集成电路、电力电子、安全、无线通信和计算机，旨在促进对半导体和硬件的兴趣，通过吸引各级学生参与高质量的科学和工程研究活动，并创建教育材料，接触到更广泛的K-12学生群体和公众。该项目将研究实现可靠和安全的无线、无电池、微创(WBMI)生物电子植入物的原则性和主动性方法。其关键思想是利用设备的位置和上下文感知，在基本的电力、通信和控制机制内建立可靠性和安全性保证。研究任务包括(1)安全、高效和容错的WBMI植入物的无线能量传输；(2)特定于WBMI的远程医疗安全认证方案及其轻量级实现；(3)基于规范的新型生物电子植入物和发射器的在线监测及其高效、紧凑的硬件实现。该项目涉及设计、优化和原型能效微型电路和系统，模糊传统设计边界，以实现低开销的主动保护。整合了该项目中研究的所有可靠性和安全保护的原则证明植入物将被制造并进行实验评估。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Wireless, Battery-less, Minimally Invasive (WBMI) bioelectronics promise a plethora of transformative clinical and scientific applications benefiting human health and well-being. This CAREER project aims at studying and addressing the critical but largely overlooked reliability and security challenges in WBMI bioelectronic devices. Given the extreme power and size constraints of these devices, reliability and security protections cannot be an afterthought and must be designed holistically with the essential bioelectronic functionalities. This project will investigate and create theoretical foundations along with practical hardware and system implementations to tackle three critical challenges towards reliable and secure WBMI bioelectronic implants. The challenges include safe, efficient, and reliable wireless power transfer, secure access and communication in both remote telemedicine and emergency scenarios, and real-time monitoring of potential failures or attacks over extended periods of operation. The research outcome of this project will be a one-of-a-kind hardware platform that expedites the research and development of practically reliable and secure implantable bioelectronic systems for pre-clinical and clinical applications. Meanwhile, this project targets reinforcing the semiconductor hardware workforce by engaging and educating graduate, college, and high school students, especially the underrepresented minorities. This highly interdisciplinary project spanning materials, integrated circuits, power electronics, security, wireless communication, and computing, targets promoting interests in semiconductor and hardware, by engaging students at all levels in high-quality scientific and engineering research activities and creating educational materials to reach a much broader group of K-12 students and the public. This project will investigate principled and proactive methods to enable reliable and secure Wireless, Battery-less, Minimally Invasive (WBMI) bioelectronic implants. The key idea is to exploit positional and contextual awareness of the device to build reliability and security assurances within the fundamental power, communication, and control mechanisms. The research tasks include (1) safe, efficient, and misalignment-tolerant wireless power transfer to WBMI implants, (2) WBMI-specific secure authentication scheme for remote telemedicine and its lightweight implementation, and secure access and communication channel in emergency scenarios, and (3) novel specification-based online monitoring for the bioelectronic implants and transmitters and its efficient, compact hardware implementations. This project involves designing, optimizing, and prototyping energy-efficient miniature circuits and systems that blur traditional design boundaries to realize proactive protections with low overheads. Proof-of-principle implants integrating all the reliability and security protections studied in this project will be fabricated and experimentally evaluated.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.