An Experimental Study of a novel MAC protocol using UHF- RFID Passive Backscatter Modulation for Brain Computer Interface (BCI) Applications

This paper discusses an implantable, low power, wireless, neural signal transmitter, to restore limb mobility in individuals with spinal cord injuries, as part of a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system. Specifically, this paper describes a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system using passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) transmitters operating in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band. This system uses backscatter modulation as its power transfer mechanism. Such low power UHF passive RFID radio technology has shown to have great potential to support invasive BCI applications. The performance of UHF passive RFID technology using a novel MAC protocol in an invasive BCI application is presented. The performance is analyzed using the novel MAC protocol and the following properties namely signal to noise ratio (SNR), received signal strength (RSS) and collision count were calculated and compared with the slotted Aloha protocol as a function of implant depth.

[1]  L. Ukkonen,et al.  Design of Wireless Links to Implanted Brain–Machine Interface Microelectronic Systems , 2012, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters.

[2]  J. R. Smith,et al.  Hybrid analog-digital backscatter: A new approach for battery-free sensing , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on RFID (RFID).

[3]  Dennis J. McFarland,et al.  Brain–computer interfaces for communication and control , 2002, Clinical Neurophysiology.

[4]  J. Holleman,et al.  NeuralWISP: An energy-harvesting wireless neural interface with 1-m range , 2008, 2008 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference.

[5]  Elad Alon,et al.  Wireless Recording in the Peripheral Nervous System with Ultrasonic Neural Dust , 2016, Neuron.

[6]  Santosh Nagaraj,et al.  Ultra wideband channel characterization for invasive biomedical applications , 2016, 2016 IEEE 17th Annual Wireless and Microwave Technology Conference (WAMICON).

[7]  Syed Hassan Ahmed,et al.  Bi-directional channel modeling for implantable UHF-RFID transceivers in brain-computer interface applications , 2018, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[8]  A. Fort,et al.  An ultra-wideband body area propagation channel Model-from statistics to implementation , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques.

[9]  Alanson P. Sample,et al.  WISP: A Passively Powered UHF RFID Tag with Sensing and Computation , 2017 .

[10]  Syed Hassan Ahmed,et al.  A comparative study of MAC protocols in brain-computer interface (BCI) applications , 2017, 2017 13th International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC).