Metamaterial-based wireless RF-MEMS strain sensors

Approximately 10% of the fractures do not heal properly because of the inability to monitor fracture healing. Standard radiography is not capable of discriminating whether bone healing is occurring normally or aberrantly. We propose and develop an implantable wireless sensor that monitors strain on implanted hardware in real time telemetrically. This enables clinicians to monitor fracture healing. Here we present the development and demonstration of metamaterial-based radio frequency (RF) micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) strain sensors for wireless strain sensing to monitor fracture healing. The operating frequency of these sensors shifts under mechanical loading; this shift is related to the surface strain of the implantable test material. In this work, we implemented metamaterials in two different architectures as bio-implantable wireless strain sensors for the first time. These custom-design metamaterials exhibit better performance as sensors than traditional RF structures (e.g., spiral coils) because of their unique structural properties (splits). They feature a low enough operating frequency to avoid the background absorption of soft tissue and yield higher Q-factors compared to the spiral structures (because their gaps have much higher electric field density). In our first metamaterial architecture of an 5 × 5 array, the wireless sensor shows high sensitivity (109 kHz/kgf, 5.148 kHz/microstrain) with low nonlinearity-error (<;200 microstrain). Using our second architecture, we then improved the structure of classical metamaterial and obtained nested metamaterials that incorporate multiple metamaterials in a compact nested structure and measured strain telemetrically at low operating frequencies. This novel nested metamaterial structure outperformed classical metamaterial structure as wireless strain sensors. By employing nested metamaterial architecture, the operating frequency is reduced from 529.8 MHz to 506.2 MHz while the sensitivity is increased from 0.72 kHz/kgf to 1.09 kHz/kgf.