Source Newsroom:
University at Buffalo
Like navy submarines, interconnected wireless body sensors could
use sonar to treat diabetes, heart failure and other ailments in real
time
Newswise — BUFFALO, N.Y. – The military has for decades used sonar for underwater communication.
Now,
researchers at the University at Buffalo are developing a miniaturized
version of the same technology to be applied inside the human body to
treat diseases such as diabetes and heart failure in real time.
The
advancement relies on sensors that use ultrasounds – the same inaudible
sound waves used by the navy for sonar and doctors for sonograms – to
wirelessly share information between medical devices implanted in or
worn by people.
“This is a biomedical advancement that could
revolutionize the way we care for people suffering from the major
diseases of our time,” said Tommaso Melodia, PhD, UB associate professor
of electrical engineering.
His research, “Towards Ultrasonic
Networking for Implantable Biomedical Device,” is supported by a
five-year, $449,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grant. The
CAREER award is the foundation’s most prestigious for young
investigators.
Details of Melodia’s work can be found at: http://1.usa.gov/17y2njQ.
The
idea of creating a network of wireless body sensors, also called a
“body area network,” is not new. Development of the technology began
roughly 10 years ago.
But most work has focused on linking sensors
together via electromagnetic radio frequency waves – the same type used
in cellular phones, GPS units and other common wireless devices.
Radio
waves can be effective but they have drawbacks such as the heat they
generate. Also, because radio waves propagate poorly through skin,
muscle and other body tissue, they require relatively large amounts of
energy, he said.
Ultrasounds may be a more efficient way to share
information, Melodia said, because roughly 65 percent of the body is
composed of water. This suggests that medical devices, such as a
pacemaker and an instrument that measures blood oxygen levels, could
communicate more effectively via ultrasounds compared to radio waves.
“Think
of how the Navy uses sonar to communicate between submarines and detect
enemy ships,” Melodia said. “It’s the same principle, only applied to
ultrasonic sensors that are small enough to work together inside the
human body and more effectively help treat diseases.”
Another
example involves connecting blood glucose sensors with implantable
insulin pumps. The sensors would monitor the blood and regulate, through
the pumps, the dosage of insulin as needed in real time.
“We are really just scratching the surface of what’s possible. There are countless potential applications,” he said.
Melodia
will use the NSF grant to do more modeling and conduct experiments with
ultrasonic, wireless body sensor networks. The grant will support PhD
student G. Enrico Santagati, who already has contributed significantly
to the project, as well as undergraduate students.
The research will address issues such as how to:
• design transmission schemes to accurately relay information between sensors without causing body tissue to overheat
• design networking protocols specialized for intra-body sensors
• how to model ultrasonic interference
• accurately simulate ultrasonic networks
• design the first existing reconfigurable testbed for experimental evaluation of ultrasonic networks.
Melodia
is a member of the Signals, Communications and Networking Research
Group in UB’s Department of Electrical Engineering in the School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences. The group carries out research in:
wireless communications and networking, cognitive radios, extreme
environment (i.e., underwater, underground) communications, secure
communications, data hiding, information theory and coding, adaptive
signal processing, compressed sensing,multimedia systems, magnetic
resonance imaging and radar systems.
Other members of the group
include professors Stella N. Batalama, Adly T. Fam, Dimitris A. Pados,
Mehrdad Soumekh; associate professors Michael Langberg, Weifeng Su and
Leslie Ying; and assistant professors Nicholas Mastronarde, Gesualdo
Scutari, Zhi Sun, Josep M. Jornet.
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