MEDICAL DEVICE SYSTEM

Abstract

A system for interfacing an in-body medical device with an external network includes a subdermal wideband on-body network (WON) hub, which in turn includes a hub rechargeable battery, a hub processor coupled to the hub rechargeable battery, a device interface configured to communicate with the in-body medical device, and coupled to the hub processor, and a hub-satellite near field communications wireless interface coupled to the hub processor. The system also includes a wearable WON server that in turn includes a server processor, a server-satellite interface coupled to the server processor, and an external network interface coupled to the server processor. The server processor implements a software controller; and a skin-mountable WON tethered satellite that includes a wired satellite-server interface, coupled to the wearable WON server, and a tethered satellite near-field communications (NFC) wireless interface, configured to communicate with the hub-satellite NFC wireless interface, and coupled to the wired satellite-server interface.

Description

Claims

1. An on-skin patch for communication with one or more sensor devices, comprising: a flexible patch substrate;a hardware processor secured to the flexible patch substrate and configured to obtain information from the one or more sensor devices;a battery secured to the flexible patch substrate and configured to provide power to components of the on-skin patch;one or more radio frequency to direct current (RF-to-DC) converters secured to the flexible patch substrate and configured to convert a received radio frequency signal to a direct current (DC) signal;a voltage converter and a voltage regulator secured to the flexible patch substrate and configured to convert the direct current (DC) signal to a direct current (DC) voltage to charge the battery; andan oscillator and a power amplifier secured to the flexible patch substrate and configured to generate a low-frequency power/data transmission signal.

2. The on-skin patch of claim 1, wherein the on-skin patch is configured to communicate with a re-usable electronics module.

3. The on-skin patch of claim 1, further comprising the one or more sensor devices, wherein at least one of the sensor devices is one of a heater/thermometer device and a potential of hydrogen (pH) sensor array.

4. The on-skin patch of claim 1, further comprising a low frequency radio frequency (RF) coupling and communication pad configured to provide communication with the hardware processor.

5. A method for processing an input signal from a medical device, the method comprising: obtaining the input signal from the medical device;determining if a response action is prescribed in response to the obtained input signal;performing a signal cleanup process and writing resulting data into a database of a wideband on-body network (WON) hub based on the response action not being prescribed in response to the obtained input signal; anddetermining a status of the response action based on the response action being prescribed in response to the obtained input signal.

6. The method of claim 5, further comprising establishing communication with a wideband on-body network (WON) server for processing the input signal and sending commands to appropriate satellites in response to determining that the response action is remote or requires heavy computing.

7. The method of claim 5, further comprising performing signal processing according to the response action recipe by the corresponding wideband on-body network (WON) hub and sending action commands to an appropriate in-body medical device in response to determining that the response action is not remote and heavy computing is not required.

8. The method of claim 5, wherein the signal cleanup process comprises at least one of filtering and resampling.