PANACEA: An Internet of Bio-NanoThings Application for Early Detection and Mitigation of Infectious Diseases

Abstract

The Internet of Bio-NanoThings (IoBNT) concept envisions the connection between biological cells and the Internet. The ultimate goal of IoBNT is to catalyze a revolution in biomedical technologies through advances in molecular communication, integrated systems, bio-nanosensors and synthetic biology to improve human health and quality of life. In this paper, an application of IoBNT called PANACEA (a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases in Latin) is presented as a solution for an end-to-end design towards realizing the IoBNT for the first time in the literature. The architecture of PANACEA is tailored to focus on diagnosis and therapy of infectious diseases. In PANACEA, to detect the communication within the cells of the body to deduce infection level, a submilimeter implantable bio-electronic device, a Bio-NanoThing, is proposed. BNT can transmit the detected infection data remotely to a wearable hub/gateway outside of the body. The hub can use mobile devices and the backbone network such as Internet or cellular systems to reach the healthcare providers who can remotely control the BNTs. Hence, PANACEA provides a system, where sensing, actuation and computing processes are tightly coupled to provide a reliable and responsive disease detection and infection recovery system. Incorporating molecular communication and conventional networks brings many challenges that are attacked in various fronts such as circuit and biosensor design, communications engineering, with novel solutions presented in this paper, accompanied with simulation results.