Powering Solutions for Biomedical Sensors and Implants Inside the Human Body: A Comprehensive Review on Energy Harvesting Units, Energy Storage, and Wireless Power Transfer Techniques

Abstract

For implantable medical devices, it is of paramount importance to ensure uninterrupted energy supply to different circuits and subcircuits. Instead of relying on battery stored energy, harvesting energy from the human body and any external environmental sources surrounding the human body ensures prolonged life of the implantable devices and comfort of the patients. In this article, we present existing issues and challenges related to the state-of-the-art solutions used for harvesting energy to power implantable devices. In addition, the details on existing energy storage technologies and various wireless power transfer techniques incorporating external or internal energy sources and sensors have been discussed. The authors have outlined the performance and power constraints of existing biomedical devices and provided a brief overview of various power architectures found in the literature. This survey has been conducted on existing implantable solutions in terms of output voltage, current, device dimension, application, generated power, energy density, and so on. Finally, the advantages and drawbacks of different solutions have been discussed and compared. Therefore, this article can be considered as an expedient reference for researchers conducting research in the field of energy scavenging, internal energy storage, wireless power transfer techniques, and power management of implantable medical devices.