Significant interest exists in creating integrated, autonomous medical microsystems combining electronics and MEMS to monitor and/or control physiological parameters. Ideally, these systems should be small, low-weight, low-power, yet with a high degree functionality in terms of sensing, actuation, and processing. Here I will describe the development of integrated microsystems for guiding the flight of moths. These systems address many of the same challenges found in medical microsystems. For instance, the systems must be extremely low mass (<1 g), have small volume (~ cc), and consume low power (~1 mW), and yet must contain components necessary to guide a moth in three-dimensional space, including MEMS-based electrical stimulation of the moth nervous system, 10-100 meter radio telemetry, computation, and electromechanical energy harvesting and accompanying power electronics. The resulting components and integrated system have significant potential for application to medical microsystems.
Joel Voldman received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1995. He received the M.S and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in 1997 and 2001, developing bioMEMS for single-cell analysis. Following this, he was a postdoctoral associate in George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School, where he studied developmental biology. In 2002 he returned to MIT as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT. In 2004 he was awarded the NBX Career Development Chair, and in 2006 promoted to Associate Professor in the department. He has been awarded an NSF CAREER award and is a member of the technical program committee for the microTAS conference, the leading international microfluidics meeting.