Kiani’s multidisciplinary research group is focused on the design and development of state-of-the-art analog/power-management integrated circuits and complete wireless systems for a wide range of applications such as wireless power transfer, energy harvesting, health monitoring, implantable medical devices, neural interfacing, and assistive technologies. These multidisciplinary research activities will lead to innovative technologies, medical devices, and self-powered wireless systems to better understand our nervous system, help people with severe disabilities and disorders, and eventually improve the life quality. Our research involves activities from basic science to modeling, simulations, prototyping, measurements, and experiments on animals. Some of the ongoing research projects in Kiani’s lab are listed below. See also: Integrated Circuits and Systems Laboratory

Integrated Power Management for Wireless Power Transfer and Energy Harvesting

In this project, we develop novel integrated power management ASICs for inductive/ultrasonic wireless power transfer as well as energy harvesting (particularly from human motion). Our goal is to enable “smart” power management ASICs that will be capable of adaptively and dynamically reconfiguring their structures to compensate for environmental and electronic variations such as coils/transducers distance, alignment, and orientation changes, resonant frequency changes, load changes, etc. Our other objective is to harvest energy from weak multi-axial human motion using a custom inertial harvester with multiple flexible beams to enable wearables with 24/7 operation for vigilant healthcare monitoring.

Wireless (Inductive/Ultrasonic) Power/Data Transfer to Miniaturized Biomedical Implants

Wireless power transmission (WPT) to biomedical implants can eliminate their need for bulky batteries, increase their longevity, and reduce their size and risks. During the past few decades, inductive links have been the most attractive and efficient method for WPT to biomedical implants. This technique can offer high power transmission efficiency, particularly when the implant size is within centimeter dimensions. By miniaturizing biomedical implants to millimeter scales, minimally invasive biosensing and localized operations such as multisite neural recording, stimulation, and even optogenetics can be achieved. Millimeter-scale implants can also minimize the tissue damage and increase the safety and longevity of the neural interface. In this project, we explore, design, and develop inductive, ultrasonic, and hybrid (inductive-ultrasonic) WPT links for powering millimeter-scale biomedical implants. Our main goal is to devise methods that are very efficient and robust against the movement of the implant, which is a key issue particularly in ultrasonic WPT.

Wireless Implantable High-Resolution Gastric Electrical-Wave Recording System

In this research, we are presenting two different methods for implantable high-resolution gastric electrical-wave (slow wave) recording. In the first design, an inductively rechargeable, wireless, and implantable system is developed that is composed of a system-on-chip (SoC) to record slow waves from multiple channels, and an external reader to recharge the SoC battery using a pair of coils and receive the SoC recorded data by backscattering. In the second design (see the figure), we are developing a network of distributed, millimeter-sized, ultrasonically interrogated implants, called Gastric Seeds, that are small, light, and wireless to minimize motion artifacts and tissue damage, for acquiring slow waves from the whole stomach through independent interrogation of each individual Gastric Seed.