Ubiquitous Wearable and Implanted Sensing: A Fully Wireless Solution

With the rapid proliferation of smart sensing devices, the imminent challenges that need to be addressed are power delivery and data communication. My research contributions primarily focus on developing wireless battery-free technology that targets implantable and wearable sensing platforms.

My talk will cover the design and data handling challenges and the innovations applied to solve them with respect to the following two applications

• First, in the context of ultra-low power (micro Watts) battery-free sensing, I will present my recent work on developing a passive analog sensing platform – the “RF Bandaid” and its data analysis infrastructure. This work was done in collaboration with the Medical Devices group at Microsoft. The motivation for this platform is the need for a continuous physiological monitoring device, that is of bandaid form-factor, which is comfortable, easy to use and inexpensive.

• The second application is a low-power (milli Watts) implantable fully-wireless “Brain-Computer-Spinal Interface” which is capable of closed-loop neural recording and stimulation. This work was done in collaboration with neuroscientists at UW, Physiology and Biophysics. This device is aimed at rehabilitation for patients paralyzed due to spinal cord injury by closing the loop between intentions in the brain and actions in the limbs.

Both of these devices harvest wireless power and communicate wirelessly but are at different operating points in the power, computation and communication spectrum. Using innovations in Backscatter communication and wireless power transfer (WPT) technology, I will highlight how we have achieved ultra-low power battery-free sensing for these two applications.

Speaker Details

Vaishnavi Ranganathan is currently pursuing her PhD as a Washington Research Foundation fellow in the Sensor Systems laboratory at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle. Her main research interests are low-power sensing devices, wireless power transfer and brain-computer interface applications. She is a member of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering which is an NSF funded engineering research center at the UW. She was also an intern at Microsoft Research in 2016 and worked with the Medical Devices group till May 2018. She received a B.Tech degree in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering from Amrita University, India, in 2011, and a M.S degree in Electrical Engineering, specializing in NEMS, from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, in 2013. As an undergraduate she gained experience in robotics and sensor design. She also worked as an undergraduate researcher in the Nanobios lab at Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, India, where her focus was MEMS for biomedical sensors

Date:
Speakers:
Vaishnavi Ranganathan
Affiliation:
University of Washington

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