Presenters described the rollout of RF communications in medical implants and body-area network devices for a wide variety of research and commercial uses. They also described advances using RF to create a handheld DNA analyzer and better medical imaging systems. The Sunday evening session attracted a full house of more than 200 attendees. But some members expressed frustration at the fragmented nature of the opportunities.

"A number of us are here because we think the next thing in chips is in medical, but none of this looks like more than a few hundred thousand or a million units, not like the billions of sockets in cellphones sold a year," said one audience member in a Q&A session.

"If we take the path of disposable sensors the market will be really, really large," said Donhee Ham, a Harvard researcher and one of the presenters."Another possibility is if we can mass produce the diagnostic systems cheaply we can help bring global health care to parts of the world that have no services today," he added.

"There are so many applications and they are scattered all over the place, so it's hard to identify what will be big," added Jacques Rudell, a professor at the University of Washington (Seattle) who helped organize the session.

Javaid Masoud, a technical fellow at Medtronic (Minneapolis) described how the company is using RF as a communications link in its cardiac implantable devices. The company helped pioneer the 402-405 MHz Medical Implant Communications Services standard.

Medtronic launched its first cardiac devices using MICS in May 2006 and had more than 128,000 of them implanted by July 2008. The devices use Medtronic's own technology, although merchant companies including Zarlink Semiconductor now ship MICS chips, too.

"We designed the radio circuitry, antennas, baseband chips and the comms protocols inside Medtronic," Masoud said. "We felt we had to do it ourselves because of the unique application," he added.

The company is now applying MICs to a range of more than a dozen different types of implantable devices it is developing for disorders ranging from diabetes to Parkinson's disease.

In a separate paper, Brian Otis of the University of Washington discussed efforts using RF to create body area networks for a wide range of uses.

"A lot of the early deployments that will drive this will be for animals," he said.

Researchers are using RF sensor nets for everything from studying brain waves in lab rats to how sparrows learn their songs in the wild. Human applications include RF sensor nets for elder care, eye implants and monitoring brain signals for patients with neural disorders.

The applications typically demand modules that are extremely low in cost, power and weight. To meet those targets, developers are looking to use analog and digital signal processing to replace general purpose processors, energy harvesting rather than batteries and passives and MEMS devices to act as radios.