A Review of Implant Intra-Body Communication

With an extending life expectancy and demand for medical healthcare, there are widespread and stringent requirements of implantable medical devices (IMDs) development for diagnostics, treatments, and therapies by emerging technologies. One of the primary targets for the IMDs is evolving a reliable, speed, and accurate communication method to provide proactive wellness management and thereby achieve early detection, disease prevention, and even treatments. Intra-body communication (IBC) is a potential technology envisioning a sensors/actuators network within a human body, which uses the conductive properties of a body and is categorized in the standardized IEEE 802.15.06 protocol. In the present review, the current state-of-art of implant intra-body communication has been surveyed. Based on the propagation mechanisms over investigated IBC spectrum (i.e., 0.1 MHz -100 MHz), the capacitive and galvanic coupling IBC is considered, where the subfields regarding modeling method (including circuit, numerical, analytical, and filter model), measurement details (including the effect of the electrode, cable, impedance, and instrument), clinical application (including cardiac pacemaker and wireless endoscope), transceiver design (including discrete component and CMOS technology) and media access control (MAC) layer design have been introduced or discussed. Furthermore, the open challenges and issues have been explored as an anticipated inspiration for future development.