A Novel Method of Transmission Enhancement and Misalignment Mitigation between Implant and External Antennas for Efficient Biopotential Sensing

Abstract

The idea of passive biosensing through inductive coupling between antennas has been of recent interest. Passive sensing systems have the advantages of flexibility, wearability, and unobtrusiveness. However, it is difficult to build such systems having good transmission performance. Moreover, their near-field coupling makes them sensitive to misalignment and movements. In this work, to enhance transmission between two antennas, we investigate the effect of superstrates and metamaterials and propose the idea of dielectric fill in between the antenna and the superstrate. Preliminary studies show that the proposed method can increase transmission between a pair of antennas significantly. Specifically, transmission increase of ≈5 dB in free space and ≈8 dB in lossy media have been observed. Next, an analysis on a representative passive neurosensing system with realistic biological tissues shows very low transmission loss, as well as considerably better performance than the state-of-the-art systems. Apart from transmission enhancement, the proposed technique can significantly mitigate performance degradation due to misalignment of the external antenna, which is confirmed through suitable sensitivity analysis. Overall, the proposed idea can have fascinating prospects in the field of biopotential sensing for different biomedical applications.