Wireless power transfer system for medical implant devices

Implantable medical devices (IMD's) are gaining popularity in the health and medical sectors because of their vast applications, such as cardiac pacemakers, artificial hearts, defibrillators, coronary stents, intraocular lenses, hip implants, orthopaedic implants, and implantable insulin pumps. These IMDs are traditionally non-rechargeable and battery-dependent with limited life span. Moreover, surgery is required to remove the dead batteries from the implant, which tends to be the biggest source of distress in patient. A Wireless power transfer (WPT) system can prove to be a better alternative which acts as a wireless charger to the medical implants.
However, designing a WPT system is a challenging task, as the distance between the power transmitter and the position of the IMD inside the human body, the operating frequency and its effect on the body's tissue, and the WPT system size as a whole are some of the major constraints. Thus the research focus in WPT systems is on enhancing the efficiency of such systems by optimizing the size and geometry of the coils of transmitter and receiver, appropriate material selection for the coil, finding the optimal operating frequency, improving the quality factor of the inductors and selection of best performing compensation capacitor is needed.