Principal Investigator Anantha Chandrakasan
Recent years have witnessed a growing increase in the use of implantable and wearable medical devices for monitoring, diagnosing, and treating medical conditions. Advancements in electronics have opened up new avenues for deploying these devices towards applications previously overlooked, such as implanting an entire repository of a medical drugs within the human body for effective time-released delivery. The advantages of a time-released implant offer over some conventional oral dosage forms are site-specific drug administration for targeted action, minimal side-effects, and sustained release of therapeutic agent. Patient compliance is more positive with the treatment regimen associated with an implantable device as it is considerably less burdensome than pills or injections. The prominent application for implantable drug deliv- ery includes diabetes management, contraception, HIV/ AIDS prevention, and chronic pain management.
In many of these applications, the control of the command to these devices lies with the patient, who can program the device as needed. For example, a woman can program her monthly schedule of contraception for her family planning and allow the device to release regular doses of contraception, alleviating daily doses. However, an alarming concern that is associated with it is the generic security concerns with regular IoT devices, and potentially, with much more catastrophic effects. Any compromise of the controller device/cell phone would render the system ineffective. The fact that there is no direct feedback from the implantable to the patient makes it even more difficult. A simple example is a malicious cell-phone continuously commanding the device to release drug without the knowledge of patient.
Work focusses on solving this problem with a combination of energy-efficient cryptography with relevant physiological properties of the user. This makes it very difficult for any attacker, even with significant control over the controller, to break the system, while providing legitimate feedback to the user.