October 12, 2021
Electrical and computer engineering seminar speaker to present 'Acousto-Bioelectronics for Implantable Sensing'
Albert Kim, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Temple University, will present "Acousto-Bioelectronics for Implantable Sensing" at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 14, in 1109 Engineering Hall.
Today, we are living in a blessed era of health care due to advanced technologies. Yet, there are many unknowns in our body. To answer the unknown, the next-generation implantable biomedical microdevices are proposed by many researchers. For this, energy transfer, size, and form factors are three critical design factors. Traditional powering methods such as batteries and inductive power transfer cannot satisfy conflicting requirements of deep penetration, omni-directionality, and the small size required for many emerging applications. One promising approach is the use of acoustic waves, or ultrasound. Acoustic waves in the body offer superior energy-conversion efficiency at millimeter-scale dimensions, deeper penetration depth, and omnidirectionality as compared to the traditional inductive powering method. This makes ultrasound an attractive candidate for powering deep-seated implantable medical devices. In this talk, Kim will focus on acousto-bioelectronics, a branch of electrical engineering that studies the use of acoustic waves in the biomedical microelectromechanical system, or BioMEMS, and nanotechnology. In particular, Kim will elaborate on some of our recent works toward developing a Smart Stent for monitoring heart disease and a brain deformation sensor for traumatic brain injury.
Kim received a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, in 2015. From 2015 to 2017, he was a research and design engineer at Intel Corp. Since July 2017, he has been with the department of electrical and computer engineering at Temple University, Philadelphia, where he is currently an assistant professor. His research interests include clinical applications of MEMS and microsystems, mobile health, and biomimetic sensors and actuators. He collaborates closely with physicians and biologists in order to transfer the technology to the clinic. He has been contributing more than 50 publications in prestigious journals, international conferences and patents. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation. Furthermore, he founded startup companies based on his research projects. One of them was previously funded by the NSF SBIR program.