Wireless intra-body communication is a promising approach for providing efficient and secure connectivity for medical implants. The low power consumption of the electronics and the conductivity of the biological tissues facilitate the system implementation, which makes the technique more powerefficient than the traditional radio frequency wireless systems. The galvanic intra-body communication uses the electrical current for signal transmission in the conductive medium of the biological tissues. In this paper, we propose an ultra-low-power communication approach by implementing a galvanic impulse method for communication between an implant and an on-body device. The communication system is designed, manufactured with off-the-shelf electronic components, and measured in the phantom and in-vivo animal experiment. The implant power consumption is 45 µW for the data rate of 64 kbps with a bit error percentage below 0.5% for the implant depth of 14 cm. The design supports long-lasting battery-powered implant sensory and communication system. INDEX TERMS Galvanic coupling, intra-body communication, biomedical implants, biomedical electronics, ultra-wideband.

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Wireless capsule endoscopy is an advanced application of using ICT in healthcare and medicine. It is a non-invasive method to examine the gastrointestinal (GI) for early diagnosis and treatment. The capsule is equipped with a camera, light source, processing, control unit, and a transmitter to send the captured pictures or videos wirelessly to an external receiver system. The capsule is used to monitor small bowel diseases, esophageal diseases, and colonic diseases. The current data rate of the capsule endoscopes is limited to 1-2 Mbps with 2-3 frames per second and significant compression rates are applied to provide an operation time at least 8 hours inside the body. The data and frame rates might be sufficient for a capsule without locomotion, in which the capsule travels slowly, and the gastric wall movements mainly manage the speed. However, the next generation of the capsules will need remote locomotion and orientation control for fast and precise diagnosis. This application requests high data rate and low image or video compression rates with high frame rates for real-time navigation and control. Such a communication system becomes power hungry and limits the longevity of the device. Design of an ultralow power wireless transmission scheme can assist the capsule device to save energy to handle the technology requirements. In this paper, we assess the communication systems of the capsule endoscopes and propose a battery-free high data rate backscatter wireless transmission scheme. The proposed system has been tested inside biological phantom in order to measure the path loss over different capsule depths. The average attenuation in a backscatter link inside biological phantom is 4.1 dB/cm in which is a linear function of capsule depth. According to link budget calculations, by using a 20 dBm transmitter at the outside of the body we can receive 8 Mbps data from the capsule at 10 cm depth. Our proposed system demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art systems in the literature.

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Wireless capsule endoscopy is a fast-growing technology in healthcare systems. Due to using battery for powering the camera, light source, wireless communication, and other electronics, it has substantial limitations with the image quality, frame rate, and operating time. In this work, we propose a wireless passive video transmission system for capsule endoscopy, in which the power consumption is reduced by using analog camera sensor, and implementing an innovative radar technique for remote reading of the analog video signal using radio frequency backscattering. The power consumption of the capsule communication system tends to zero. The communication electronics system is minimized to a single Varactor diode with appropriate matching circuits and the image sensor power consumption is reduced by eliminating the camera sensor's analog to digital converter. With these improvements the capsule system can operate for a longer period of time which enables the feasibility of continuous video streaming during the gastric tract screening. The design feasibility is demonstrated in a phantom experiment, and validated in an animal experiment for depths 6-11 cm using a bi-static radar system at 400 MHz, implemented using software defined radio platform.INDEX TERMS Analog backscatter, battery-free video streaming, passive wireless communication, remote healthcare, wireless capsule endoscopy.