Implantable Medical Devices

— Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is widely used for the treatment of movement disorder. It is being explored in the new application areas. Since DBS deals with the internal portion of the brain it offers several challenges. It is difficult to understand the exact mechanism of DBS. This therapy is patient dependent and procedures may change drastically from patient to patient. In this paper DBS is discussed and its potential applications are explored. There are many challenges/restrictions while using this technique. Some major challenges are analyzed for better understanding of DBS.

Wireless communications are increasingly important in health-care applications, particularly in those that use
implantable medical devices (IMDs). Such systems have many
advantages in providing remote healthcare in terms of monitoring, treatment and prediction for critical cases. However, the
existence of malicious adversaries, referred to as nodes, which
attempt to control implanted devices, constitutes a critical risk
for patients. Such adversaries may perform dangerous attacks
by sending malicious commands to the IMD, and any weakness
in the device authentication mechanism may result in serious
problems including death. In this paper we present a physical
layer (PHY) authentication technique for IMDs that does not
use existing methods of cryptology. In addition to ensuring
authentication, the proposed technique also provides advantages
in terms of decreasing processing complexity of IMDs and
enhances overall communications performance.

Wireless communication applications for implantable medical devices (IMDs) are promising in healthcare because of many advantages in remote health monitoring, treatment and prediction for critical cases. However, any drawback in security of these devices against malicious attacks may lead to serious problems such as theft of private information, wrong treatment and even death. In this paper, we provide a comparative review of the current literature on IMD security research to have a better understanding the state of the art and the gaps in this direction.

This paper presents a fully implantable, wirelessly powered subcutaneous amperometric biosensor. We propose a novel ultra-low power all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) based potentiostat architecture for electrochemical sensing. The system is wirelessly powered by near-field RF coupling of an on-chip antenna to an external coil at 915 MHz. Bi-directional wireless telemetry supports data transmission from the sensor to the external reader (uplink) via backscattering, and reconfiguration of the sensor chip over the RF downlink. The 1.2×1.2 mm2 prototype is fabricated in TSMC 65nm CMOS process. The potentiostat achieves a 100pA sensitivity over a full scale current range of 0–350nA. The total power consumption of the system is 4μW.