Midfield Wireless Power Transfer for Deep-Tissue Biomedical Implants

Midfield wireless power transfer has proved its advantages in power delivery to miniature implantable medical devices located deeply in the human body; however, the delivered power level is still low. Besides, design proposals for a compact source structure concentrating the transmitter field on a miniature implant remain challenges. This letter presents a novel compact transmitting structure (TX) at the midfield band and shows the capability of focusing the magnetic field inside the human tissue. Source performance has been verified by implantable planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) with a total size of 9 × 13 mm
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(RX) that positioned in the heart tissue layer at a 55 mm separated distance of TX and RX. In addition, the power transfer efficiency has been demonstrated by a measurement setup using pork muscle, which obtained a good match of the transmission coefficient between the simulation and experiment results. Consequently, for 1 W of output power from the midfield transmitter, the received energy could be achieved more than 5.6 mW via the implantable antenna at a subwavelength distance.