I-Corps: Highly-Efficient Adaptive Wireless Power Transmission and Management

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal involves wireless power transmission (WPT) that can be used to either continuously power up a device or intermittently recharge its battery without any direct electrical contact between the energy source and that device. The typical users will be researchers that currently have difficulties in conducting behavioral research on small freely behaving animal models with today's technologies. In animal research, long-term biological data acquisition, stimulation, and drug delivery are necessary, and involve cables connected between sensors or electrodes attached to or implanted in the animal body and rack-mounted data acquisition and processing devices, leading to constraints on animal movements and behavior. The proposed technology allows uninterrupted animal experiments in enriched experimental arenas with arbitrary shapes and dimensions. By providing a large wirelessly-powered and communicated experimental arena, called the EnerCage system, the proposed innovative solution is expected to allow researchers to design experiments that are not possible with today's bio-instruments. The 'EnerCage' system is capable of conforming to experimental arenas with arbitrary shapes and dimensions, and creating a focused magnetic field distribution across these arbitrary shaped arenas by utilizing an array of overlapping hexagonal planar spiral coils, closed-loop control of the received power, dual-band wireless data communication, and wireless non-line-of-sight tracking of the animal subjects via an array of magnetic sensors. The EnerCage system will enable uninterrupted neural interfacing with freely behaving animals in large experimental arenas.