Implantable Medical Devices Detection Based On Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers and A Micropython Internet of Medical Things Nodes

This paper demonstrates, for the first time, a detection system for Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) based on Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (PMUTs). The system is connected to a cloud service through a low-cost MicroPython microcontroller acting as an Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) node. A PMUT array, acting as an ultrasonic antenna and intrabody range-finding device, is used to detect the implantation distance of several IMDs through the Time-of-Flight (ToF) method. The collected measurements are then transmitted to the cloud over the microcontroller's WiFi board where the monitoring is done real-time upon the reception of each data-set. Ultimately, this work shows the detection of three IMDs implanted at several distances in a tissue phantom, the implementation of a TX and RX circuit, the design and fabrication of PMUTs, the detection protocol in MicroPython, and the real-time processing algorithm run on the cloud platform.