Case-Study on Visible Light Communication for Implant Monitoring

The focus of this paper is the feasibility of Visible Light Communication (VLC) for the monitoring of implants in rodents by example of two approaches. One of the VLC variants is intended for manually triggered transmission and takes advantage of the CMOS sensor rolling shutter principle. The second approach is designed mainly for autonomous monitoring. Trials with freely moving animals have shown that the first approach provides a throughput of 148 bit/s. For the automatic monitoring a transmission every 6 hours is sufficient for a reliable daily update of the implant status.VLC exhibits limited range and channel capacity in comparison to radio frequency (RF) based telemetry. However, the advantage of VLC solutions is the minimal space requirement as only a single LED is needed in addition to the microcontroller on the transmitter side.