Design and Implementation of a Highly Compact Intraocular Antenna With Enhanced Bandwidth for Wireless Data Telemetry in Retinal Prosthesis

Abstract

In this work, a miniature intra-ocular antenna (2.8 × 2.8 × 0.254 mm$^{3}$) with enhanced bandwidth (1.2 GHz) is proposed for wireless data transmission in retinal prosthesis (RPs). The proposed intra-ocular (IO) antenna is based on a self-tuned meandered structure operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. A mimicking eye phantom model is developed using a non-ionic chemical compound with dielectric properties equivalent to the human eye to facilitate various measurements in a realistic environment. The proposed IO antenna is placed inside the eye phantom (vitreous humor) model to evaluate its performance for efficient wireless data telemetry application. The measurements of S-parameters were observed to exhibit a substantial correlation with the simulated results. The measured impedance bandwidth of the proposed IO antenna at 2.4 GHz is 1.2 GHz. The efficacy of the proposed IO antenna is validated through specific absorption rate (SAR) and link budget analysis. In addition, the wireless data transmission with the proposed IO antenna was experimentally validated using a standalone data transmission system.