CAREER: Reliable and Secure Minimally Invasive Bioelectronic Implants through Contextual Awareness

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

Wireless, Battery-less, Minimally Invasive (WBMI) bioelectronics promise a plethora of transformative clinical and scientific applications benefiting human health and well-being. This CAREER project aims at studying and addressing the critical but largely overlooked reliability and security challenges in WBMI bioelectronic devices. Given the extreme power and size constraints of these devices, reliability and security protections cannot be an afterthought and must be designed holistically with the essential bioelectronic functionalities. This project will investigate and create theoretical foundations along with practical hardware and system implementations to tackle three critical challenges towards reliable and secure WBMI bioelectronic implants. The challenges include safe, efficient, and reliable wireless power transfer, secure access and communication in both remote telemedicine and emergency scenarios, and real-time monitoring of potential failures or attacks over extended periods of operation. The research outcome of this project will be a one-of-a-kind hardware platform that expedites the research and development of practically reliable and secure implantable bioelectronic systems for pre-clinical and clinical applications. Meanwhile, this project targets reinforcing the semiconductor hardware workforce by engaging and educating graduate, college, and high school students. This highly interdisciplinary project spanning materials, integrated circuits, power electronics, security, wireless communication, and computing, targets promoting interests in semiconductor and hardware, by engaging students at all levels in high-quality scientific and engineering research activities and creating educational materials to reach a much broader group of K-12 students and the public. This project will investigate principled and proactive methods to enable reliable and secure Wireless, Battery-less, Minimally Invasive (WBMI) bioelectronic implants. The key idea is to exploit positional and contextual awareness of the device to build reliability and security assurances within the fundamental power, communication, and control mechanisms. The research tasks include (1) safe, efficient, and misalignment-tolerant wireless power transfer to WBMI implants, (2) WBMI-specific secure authentication scheme for remote telemedicine and its lightweight implementation, and secure access and communication channel in emergency scenarios, and (3) novel specification-based online monitoring for the bioelectronic implants and transmitters and its efficient, compact hardware implementations. This project involves designing, optimizing, and prototyping energy-efficient miniature circuits and systems that blur traditional design boundaries to realize proactive protections with low overheads. Proof-of-principle implants integrating all the reliability and security protections studied in this project will be fabricated and experimentally evaluated. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.