Conductive Backscatter Communication for Dual-Chamber Leadless Pacemakers

Dual-chamber and multichamber leadless pacemakers (PMs) are emerging solutions for reducing the limitations of conventional wire-based PMs. One of the main challenges in migrating to leadless PMs is having reliable and low-power data telemetry among the PMs inside the heart chambers. Backscatter communication is a solution for battery-constrained data links and can be applied for the implants using specific designs. In this article, we propose one-way backscatter communication based on conductive coupling for leadless PMs. The implant capsules can communicate with an on-body device without having any active transmitter. The complexity and power consumption are shifted to the remote on-body reader. Dual-chamber PM communication is enabled by using the subcarrier technique for discriminating the devices in the frequency domain. A low data rate of about 11 kb/s is assigned to each PM capsule to communicate its vital information to the reader. The proposed system is designed and realized using off-the-shelf electronic components. The whole system is evaluated in an
in vivo
experiment. Results indicate the potential of using conductive backscatter for wireless communication in leadless PMs.