Energy budget of an implantable glucose measurement system

Abstract

Abstract The theoretical evaluation of an implantable system measuring glucose for diabetes diagnostics and therapy has recently been presented. This work reports on the realisation of the proposed system on a printed circuit board and measurements of its energy budget. It is shown that the system can be run with small 3.2 V batteries for more than six months with an average energy consumption of 0.12 mAh. 1 Introduction Implantable medical systems widely in use, like pacemak-ers, defibrillators and insulin pumps have paved the way to ever more complex applications of implants, e.g. artificial retina, intelligent hip prosthesis etc. [1, 2]. Recently the architecture of an implantable sensor system measuring glucose concentration and temperature in the subcutaneous tissue has been outlined [3]. Here we present the measured power consumption of the system, which is one of the de-cisive parameters of implantable devices governing their operational lifetime. In the first part of this work, the hardware components of the glucose monitor will be de-tailed, while section 2 will describe the application and op-eration scenario. Measurement methods for the energy budget and results will be presented in section 3 and 4, re-spectively. At the end the conclusions and an outlook are given.