Nanoscale devices featuring Terahertz (THz)-based wireless communication capabilities are envisioned to be deployed within human bloodstreams. Such devices are envisaged to enable fine-grained sensing-based applications for detecting events for early indications of various health conditions, as well as actuation-based ones such as the targeted drug delivery. Intuitively, associating the locations of such events with the events themselves would provide an additional utility for precision diagnostics and treatment. This vision recently yielded a new class of in-body localization coined under the term "flow-guided nanoscale localization". Such localization can be piggybacked on THz-based communication for detecting body regions in which events were observed based on the duration of one circulation of a nanodevice in the bloodstream. From a decades-long research on objective benchmarking of "traditional" indoor localization, as well as its eventual standardization (e.g., ISO/IEC 18305:2016), we know that in early stages the reported performance results were often incomplete (e.g., targeting a subset of relevant metrics), carrying out benchmarking experiments in different evaluation environments and scenarios, and utilizing inconsistent performance indicators. To avoid such a "lock-in" in flow-guided localization, in this paper we discuss a workflow for standardized evaluation of such localization. The workflow is implemented in the form of an open-source framework that is able to jointly account for the mobility of the nanodevices in the bloodstream, in-body THz communication between the nanodevices and on-body anchors, and energy-related and other technological constraints at the nanodevice level. Accounting for these constraints, the framework is able to generate the raw data that can be streamlined into different flow-guided solutions for generating standardized performance benchmarks.

翻译：具有太赫兹无线通信能力的纳米设备被设想部署在人体血流中。此类设备旨在实现基于精细感知的应用，以检测各种健康状况的早期征兆，以及基于驱动的应用，如靶向药物递送。直观地，将这些事件的位置与事件本身关联起来将为精确诊断和治疗提供额外价值。这一愿景近来催生了一种新型体内定位，称为"流引导纳米尺度定位"。这种定位可搭载于太赫兹通信，通过纳米设备在血流中循环一周的持续时间来检测观察到事件的体区。从长达数十年的"传统"室内定位客观基准测试研究及其最终标准化（例如ISO/IEC 18305:2016）可知，在早期阶段，报告的性能结果往往不完整（例如仅针对相关指标的子集），在不同评估环境和场景中开展基准测试实验，并使用不一致的性能指标。为避免流引导定位陷入此类"锁定"，本文讨论了对此类定位进行标准化评估的工作流程。该工作流程以开源框架形式实现，能够联合考虑纳米设备在血流中的移动性、纳米设备与体外锚点之间的体内太赫兹通信，以及纳米设备层面的能量相关及其他技术约束。在考虑这些约束的条件下，该框架能够生成原始数据，这些数据可被流式处理到不同的流引导解决方案中，以生成标准化性能基准。