Annual report 2009 - Imec

mEDICINE
gOES DIgITAL
April 2009, The Economist issued a special edition
titled “Medicine Goes Digital”. According
to the magazine, the convergence of biology
and engineering is turning healthcare into an information
industry, a change that will be disruptive, but also
hugely beneficial for patients. This article is only one
of many examples showing that the idea of leveraging
IC technology for healthcare is garnering worldwide
attention. There is a growing hope that, with the help
of electronics, we will be able to treat more people
than we can today, at a lower price per person, and
for a wider range of conditions, even including preventive
healthcare.
I believe that electronics will be able to materialize
that hope, for a number of reasons. First, we more and
more succeed in creating technology that fits the human
body: ultrasmall, ultraflexible, intelligent systems.
Second, it is relevant technology that can help people
lead a healthier life. And last, we have proven production
processes to cost-effectively mass-produce such
IC-based devices.
At imec and Holst Centre, we work on two application
domains.
One is body area networks, where you carry microsensors
comfortably on you body or in your clothes.
Microsensors that monitor body parameters and that
transmit results wirelessly. That is a technology that is
currently gaining acceptance in the medical and the
consumer electronics community; technology that
is beginning to appear on future product roadmaps.
Based on what is being developed, e.g. by imec,
the industry sees a road to relevant, profitable, massproduced
applications. And to grow that interest
further, that’s why we go to great lengths to fabricate
prototypes, and to have them used and validated at
universities and hospitals.
A second application domain concerns implantables,
electronics that function inside the body. Also here,
we have made progress, but it will definitely take
more time before commercial applications are fabricated
that build on this research of ours. The inside of
a human body is altogether a more challenging environment
to develop technology for. And given the
stringent regulations and long approval procedures for
this type of applications, the industry is more cautious
before it embarks on product development. Never-
theless, the benefits of such implantable solutions,
which can be based on our out-of-the-box and very advan
ced technology solutions, are obviously important.
For body area networks, what are the technolo gi cal
challenges? You want integrated systems that are as
INTERVIEW WITh chRIs VaN hoof
HUMAN++
small and comfortable as possible. And you want
them to be extremely reliable and easy to use,
requiring no maintenance. That calls for inno va tive
break throughs in sensing, packaging (e.g. flexible,
stretch able packages), wireless communication, and
energy technology (e.g. battery technology and
en er gy scavenging). For many of these areas, imec
has achie ved breakthroughs and has come up with
solutions.
An obvious issue is: how do you design, optimize, and
integrate these systems? This is also an area of innovation,
because it calls for combining various technologies
(e.g. MEMS sensors, wireless radios, intelligence)
in one package. A traditional approach would be to
optimize all subsystems, and then combine them in a
package. But for these types of applications, this will
lead to solutions that are suboptimal by several orders
of magnitude. Therefore, we started the path of
heterogeneous system co-optimization. One example
is an optimization where the wireless sensor only
sends relevant information (for example heart beat
rhythm analysis). To do that, you need on-board intelligence
to compute and extract the relevant data.
But you also need a radio that can be switched off
and on on-the-fly, almost without using energy. This
way, you could reduce the system power consumption
by a factor of up to 100.
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