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.

Nanotechnology is enabling the development of a new generation of devices which are able to sense, process and communicate, while being in the scale of tens to hundreds of cubic nanometers. Such small, imperceptible devices enhance not only current applications but enable entirely new paradigms especially for in-body environments. This paper introduces a localization and tracking concept for bionanosensors floating in the human bloodstream to detect anomalies in the body. Besides the nanoscale sensors, the proposed system also comprises macroscale anchor nodes attached to the skin of the monitored person. To realize autonomous localization and resource-efficient wireless communication between sensors and anchors, we propose to exploit inertial positioning and sub-terahertz backscattering. The proposed system is a first step towards early disease detection as it aims at localizing body regions which show anomalies. Simulations are conducted to enable a systematical evaluation on the feasibility of the approach.

This article presents fundamental challenges in the development of a self-sustainable and biocompatible network infrastructure to interconnect the next-generation electrical and biological wearable and implantable devices, i.e., the Internet of Bio-NanoThings. The direct contact of IoBNT devices with the human body, where the cells naturally communicate and organize into networks, suggests the possibility to exploit these biological communications for the device-to-device interconnection. The aim of this work is to investigate minimally invasive, heterogeneous, and externally accessible electrical/molecular communication channels to transmit information between these devices through the Microbiome-Gut-Brain Axis (MGBA), composed of the gut microbial community, the gut tissues, the enteric nervous system. A framework to develop a network infrastructure on top of the biological processes underlying the MGBA, and the intercommunications among its components is proposed. To implement this framework, the following challenges need to be tackled. First, physical channel models should be developed to quantitatively characterize electrical and molecular communications through the MGBA. Second, novel technological solutions in information modulation, coding and routing should be developed. Third, to support these efforts with experimental data, a first-of-a-kind implantable MGBA network probe device composed of a hub connected to an ensemble of electrical and molecular stimulation and sensing modules should be designed and engineered, together with an innovative gut-on-a-chip in-vitro model system. The discussion in this paper establishes the basis for a completely novel transdisciplinary networking domain at the core of the next-generation biomedical systems for pervasive, perpetual, and remote healthcare.

The human body can be considered a complex natural network due to the variety of interconnections between the different body regions. One example is the network of blood vessels, where artificial communication channels can be rendered using nanosensors that travel in the bloodstream as collectors and carriers of information. Further advancing this vision, in this work we investigate the detection and localization capabilities of flowing nanosensors in the blood flow to report abnormalities in the human body. Specifically, we target the detection of quorum sensing molecules and provide a methodology to evaluate its performance. The methodology consists of modeling the traveling path of nanosensors along the vessels through a Markov chain, and the use of machine learning (ML) models to compute their transition probabilities. We illustrate the resulting distribution of nanosensors in the body, which evidences a close match to expected results. We also evaluate their detection and localization capabilities in different body regions revealing their effectiveness to determine the presence of abnormalities in the human vessels

The progress of molecular communication (MC) is tightly connected to the progress of nanomachine design. State-of-the-art states that nanomachines can be built either from novel nanomaterials by the help of nanotechnology or they can be built from living cells which are modified to function as intended by synthetic biology. With the growing need of the biomedical applications of MC, we focus on developing bio-compatible communication systems by engineering the cells to become MC nanomachines. Since this approach relies on modifying cellular functions, the improvements in the performance can only be achieved by integrating new biological properties. A previously proposed model for molecular communication is using bacteria as information carriers between transmitters and receivers, also known as bacterial nanonetworks. This approach has suggested encoding information into the plasmids inserted into the bacteria which leads to extra overhead for the receivers to decode and analyze the plasmids to obtain the encoded information. Another scheme, which is proposed in this paper, is to determine the digital information transmitted based on the quantity of bacteria emitted. While this scheme has its simplicity, the major drawback is the low-data rate resulting from the long propagation of the bacteria. To improve the performance, this paper proposes a distributed modulation scheme utilizing three bacterial properties, namely, engineering of plasmids, conjugation, and bacterial motility. In particular, genetic engineering allows us to engineer the different combinations of genes representing the different series of bits. When compared with binary density modulation and the M-ary density modulation, it is shown that the distributed modulation scheme outperforms the other two approaches in terms of bit error probability as well as the achievable rate for varying quantity of bacteria transmitted, distances, as well as time slot length.