Ion-Based Communication for Implantable Bioelectronics

Recently developments of implantable devices requires the advancement of wireless communication protocol. Conductive nature of biological tissue challenges traditional wireless communication with energy efficiency, bandwidth, form factor, and scalability. Here, we introduce ionic communication (IC) that uses ions to effectively propagate MHz-range signals. We demonstrate that IC operates by generating and sensing electrical potential energy within polarizable media. IC was tuned to transmit across relevant tissue depths. The radius of propagation was controlled to enable multi-line parallel communication and it did not interfere with concurrent use of other bioelectronics. We created a fully implantable IC-based neural interface device that acquired and non-invasively transmitted neurophysiologic data from freely moving rodents with stability sufficient for isolation of action potentials from individual neurons. IC is a biologically-based data communication that establishes long-term, high fidelity interactions across intact tissue.