Bioelectronic Medicine

Post Reply
Xorax
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:04 pm

Bioelectronic Medicine

Post by Xorax »

One time I attended a seminar by IEEE Circuits & Systems Society on Bioelectronic Medicine & Wearable Devices.
The field is very interdisciplinary with subjects used such as machine & deep learning, signal processing, RF & Microwave, Nanotechnology, Power Electronics, Artificial Intelligence, and most importantly Healthcare & Medicine.

We had four different professors each offering their perspectives.

A cool development was a device that sends an early warning to medical staff for a seizure attack about 5 to 10 seconds, which is great start. The system works by using optical transducer that converts light energy emitted by the brain to electrical energy.

Challenges in this emerging field (Very Technical):
Design problem: RF Circuit needs capacitors & inductors, an inductor can be of high inductance such as 50kH, and this becomes a huge problem in microelectronics since we need the components to be small, an RF circuit was shown and the problem is that the transistors in it have parasitic capacitors and could negatively affect the gain and frequency.
Ohm's law simply won't cut it anymore, and we have to use wave analysis techniques so analyzing it becomes very complicated. A solution to this would be to break it down into smaller pieces, or better yet create neural networks to predict each S parameter.
A rather interesting challenge which is the trade off between power efficient but slow based on MOSFETs, high performance but power inefficient based on Bipolar Junction Transistors, power efficient and high performance but very expensive and complicated to design based on BiCMOS (combination of MOSFETs & BJTs).
Although this field is still relatively new, and only in the realms of academia. I believe it has great potential to become much more prominent as it becomes more affordable overtime maybe in the next 5 to 10 years. Who knows maybe we will find a way to filter out the excess neurological current for people who suffer from epileptic & febrile seizures by dissipating it to the ground while preserving the needed electric current such as in a low pass filter in the image below.
Image
This electronic circuit is an active low pass filter, it blocks signals with high frequencies and it receives the signal at Vin the input terminal. The resistor R, and capacitor C dictate the frequency allowed to pass. The higher the frequency the output signal deteriorates, intuitively we can see that the higher the frequency the lower the capacitor's resistance, as electric current takes the path of least resistance. As seen by the plot below:
Image
Represented by the below transfer function:
H(s) = 1/(1 + sRC) = 1/(1+s/ω_o)

Transfer Function: A mathematical equation that shows the relationship of the output with the input and an electronic systems efficiency in terms of frequency.
f: The frequency.
ω = 2π * f : The angular frequency
ω_o = 1/RC The cut off frequency.
Z_C = 1/jωC : The impedance of a capacitor.
I know I got a bit too technical but let me know what your thoughts are in the comments below.

If anybody is interested I can start a thread about Electronics and help teach you we will start from the very basic for anybody who wants to delve deeper in technological development.
Post Reply