The lack of post-deploy­ment vis­i­bil­i­ty into sys­tem behav­ior is one of the major chal­lenges in ensur­ing the reli­able oper­a­tion of implantable med­ical devices (IMDs). While wire­less con­nec­tiv­i­ty is becom­ing com­mon in IMDs for mon­i­tor­ing device sta­tus, con­ven­tion­al wire­less links incur sig­nif­i­cant ener­gy over­heads for data acqui­si­tion, pro­cess­ing, and active radio trans­mis­sion. While low-pow­er trans­ceivers have been intro­duced to reduce the ener­gy con­sumed by the radio itself, the ener­gy con­sumed by the micro­con­troller for pro­cess­ing data and con­trol­ling the radio has often been over­looked. As a result, in IMDs that have a strin­gent ener­gy con­straint, pro­longed sig­nal mon­i­tor­ing over a wire­less chan­nel is infea­si­ble due to this pro­hib­i­tive­ly high pow­er consumption.To address this chal­lenge, we present TeleProbe, which enables zero-pow­er prob­ing of sig­nals in IMDs. TeleProbe is a wire­less, oscil­lo­scope-like prob­ing mech­a­nism for IMDs that allows direct read­out of analog/digital sig­nals in real time using an LC tank cir­cuit, with­out any pow­er over­head imposed on the IMD. We have designed and imple­ment­ed ful­ly func­tion­al pro­to­types of TeleProbe and demon­strat­ed its util­i­ty in the con­text of two prac­ti­cal usage sce­nar­ios: in-situ pow­er analy­sis and off-chip ser­i­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion bus mon­i­tor­ing in IMDs.

• RESEARCH PUBLICATION