Research Projects

Humans’ daily life has been influenced with rapid growth of modern technologies. These advancements are also observed in human healthcare sector with the development of the modern biomedical devices. These biomedical devices are aimed to assist in patient diagnosis, monitoring, and therapeutic applications. The wireless Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) have emerged as a critical area within biomedical engineering, driven by the increasing demand to monitor physiological functions and deliver therapeutic interventions to diseased organs. It has been reported that over 3 million individuals globally depend on pacemakers, while more than 60 million people utilize cochlear implants to enhance their hearing. Since the introduction of the first implantable cardiac pacemaker in the late 1950s, IMD technology play a significant role in various medical contexts, including cardiac pacemakers, cochlear implants, deep brain neurostimulators, insulin pumps, glucose monitors, intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring systems, and wireless capsule endoscopy, among many other applications. Design and analysis of wireless biomedical devices involve a multi-disciplinary approach. An implantable antenna is also one of the key components in the modern wireless IMDs for establishing robust data communication with external control/remote unit. However, designing an antenna for IMDs deals with several design challenges posed by the lossy nature of human body tissue. Moreover, implantable antenna designed requires to meet compact size constraints, biocompatibility, and low power consumption. Maintaining human safety when the tissue is subjected to electromagnetic wave is also one of the crucial aspect in designing the antenna. Efficient implantable antennas for single/multi-band operation with different antenna topologies such as spiral meandered, slotted structure etc had been reported in the recent past. In addition, Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) structures implantable antenna for enhance data transmission rate also has been proposed. However, the antennas reported had gone through different developmental stages to obtain the optimize antenna performance. In another aspect, the characteristic mode analysis (CMA) based approach of EM modeling of antenna structure has found quite interest among researchers in past. It may be noted that CM based approach gives a design guideline by understanding the intrinsic radiation features of the antenna structure through modal analysis irrespective of a source which inherently depends on the Eigen response of the structure. However, in the implantable antenna context, the employment of CM based preliminary design approach is still in infancy.