CASE STUDY-1

Antennas for Healthcare and Imaging

Antennas control, direct and filter electromagnetic waves and form a key
component of the microwave wireless communications revolution. Future
developments will climb the frequency spectrum to embrace millimeter waves,
where for example 60GHz offers short-range communication with Gigabit
bandwidths. Microwave wireless communications will move from the largely
social voice/text media to a wide range of monitoring applications via sensor
networks, and patient health telemetry /monitoring /control via on-body and in-
body sensors and actuators will be a major user of this technology. Indeed, medical
and healthcare application of microwaves for treatment and communication is
rapidly becoming a major worldwide growth area. Electronic implants to aid
patents on a permanent or temporary basis are also seeing major growth, with
international companies investing massively in R&D. Coincident with this
technology there has been a massive increase in healthcare provision in the UK
combined with an associated revolution in how treatment is offered to the patient.
The simplicity and utility of technologies such as UWB, Bluetooth, GSM and 3G
with voice, data, and streaming video offers much to healthcare. In the field of
imaging short pulse microwave UWB offers non-ionizing screening technology for
cancer detection, whilst Terahertz (THz) radiation has enormous potential for a
broad range of applications from health care to security, with spectroscopic
materials analysis and atmospheric sensing of special scientific importance. It has
already proven to be a valuable tool for applications including chemical
spectroscopy (to detect biohazards and label-free sensing of genetic sequences),
security imaging, non-destructive testing, cutaneous imaging and wireless
communication at data rates exceeding 10Gb/s. This grant aims to focus our
antenna, on/body propagation and metamaterial expertise into these areas by
deploying short to medium term PDRA effort on feasibility studies or proofs of
concept, which, if successful, would lead to full proposals being submitted.
CASE STUDY 2
Smart Antenna Systems for Cooperative Low-Power
Wireless Personal and Body Area Networks
Wireless sensor networks are attractive solutions that can be used
in healthcare and sport performance monitoring applications
which will enable constant monitoring of health data and constant
access to the patient regardless of the current location or activity
and with a fraction of cost of the regular face-to-face examination.
Such a system is particularly useful in the case of in-home
assistance of the elderly and rapid repatriation of recovering
patents to their own homes, as well as for smart nursing homes,
clinical trials and research augmentation. It was estimated in
2012, that wireless sensor solutions could save $25 billion
worldwide in annual healthcare costs by reducing hospitalizations
and extending independent living for the elderly. Current wireless
sensor solutions are limited in that they do not provide the means
to overcome obstacles and shadowing of propagating radio waves
and also reduce the effect of interference in congested radio
environments. The project will conduct research into new
techniques and methods that combine both antenna and radio
propagation engineering with networking and smart frequency
agile communication systems. It aims to develop underpinning
capabilities for an advanced low-power wearable antenna
elements coupled with intelligent control algorithm capable of
sensing and understanding the dynamic human body and dense
indoor radio environment. Wireless monitoring of patients with
critical illnesses can be taken as an example to demonstrate the
benefit this technology will bring to the healthcare services. In
dense hospital (or care homes) environments, there are many
wireless standards present and radio communication is faced with
many obstacles. In cases where there is no clear path between
the patient's sensors (ECG, Blood pressure, blood sugar level,
etc.) and the access points or the carer's receiving units, for
example when a patient is laying face-down on a wireless sensor
monitoring the heart, the communication link can be lost
completely - a risk which is unacceptable to the healthcare
profession. In cases when there is a lengthened radio propagation
path from shadowing, the wireless sensor requires more power to
communicate with the access point. For a system consisting of a
number of independent sensors monitoring different vital signs,
the power consumption can be significant enough to make the
approach impractical, particularly for the elderly, whose reliability
to recharge the power source cannot be guaranteed. Proposed in
this project is a cooperative communication network of on-body
wireless devices in which individual antennas in the network can
adapt their radiation mode to switch between communicating
with off-body units or using neighboring devices on the same
body. Appropriately configured, such a system will ensure that the
data from the body-worn device can be communicated to the
local base station or access point either directly or via one or
more on body sensor hops. So regardless of degree of shadowing
- the system will autonomously find a communication pathway
around the body to an antenna with the lowest path loss to the
access point, hence minimizing power consumption. The ability of
the system to autonomously detect an uncongested part of the
available radio spectrum for the communication link further adds
to improved battery life.
ASSIGNMENT 3