Introduction

The emergence of smart implants and implantable robotics demands the development of new, ultra-low power micro-electronic devices combined with biohybrid and bioinspired concepts that translate fundamental biological principles into engineering design rules or integrate living components into synthetic structures to create robots that performs like natural systems. The vision of the Centre is to harness new material and sensing technologies with abiotic/biotic interfaces combined with biohybrid and bioinspired designs for long-term/transient implants and wearable robotics, supporting applications including continuous in situ, in vivo monitoring of tissue viability, quantitative assessment of therapeutic outcomes, and closed-loop control, actuation and functional stimulation. Key research issues addressed by our team include, for example, the development active sensing paradigms with resource efficient on-node processing incorporating self-calibration and closed-loop compensation and on-chip, multisensory integration; investigation of effective power delivery, wireless data path, quality of service and device security for secure clinical deployment; ultra-low power ASIC and microelectronics incorporating ultra-thin area efficient SoC; power delivery/harvesting and bioinspired QoS; heterogeneous, anisotropic, hierarchical, multifunctional materials; additive manufacturing with actuator-embedding; reliable tissue interfacing and sampling; stable, reagentless operation and readout; sensor and probe packaging; as well as optics/device miniaturisation and real-time signal/spectral analysis under resource constraints.

Research Interests:

• Ultra-low power ASICs and neuromorphic computing
• Soft microelectronics with abiotic/biotic interfaces
• Bioprinting and soft lithography
• Biohybrid and bioinspired actuators
• Bio-MEMS and smart implants
• Human organs-on-chips