A fully integrated telemonitoring system for diagnosing in-stent restenosis

This paper presents a fully integrated monitoring system for diagnosing restenosis in coronary-artery stents. Power is transferred wirelessly to the 0.13-μm CMOS monitoring circuit that is embedded on the stent and reads and transmits the sensory data from the pressure sensors which are also embedded on the stent. An auxiliary circuit is introduced to facilitate the alignment of the external reader with the stent. The alignment circuit starts operating from a rectified supply of 500 mV drawing 8.3 μA from the harvested supply voltage. The main transmitter which sends the sensory data operates from a rectified supply voltage of 880 mV while drawing ≈178 μA. The monitoring system provides a sensitivity of 555 kHz/fF. In-vitro measurement results confirm the performance of the system.