Remote diagnostics and monitoring using microwave technique – improving healthcare in rural areas and in exceptional situations

Interests towards wireless portable medical diagnostics and monitoring systems, which could be used outside hospital e.g. during pandemic or catastrophic situations, have increased recently. Additionally, portable monitoring solutions could partially address widely recognized challenges related to healthcare equality in rural areas. Microwave based sensing has recently been recognized as emerging technology for portable medical monitoring and diagnostics devices since they may enable development of safe, reliable, and low-cost solutions for future’s telemedicine. The aim of this paper is to present the basic idea of microwave -based medical monitoring and discuss its possibilities, advantages, and challenges. In particular, we show that microwaves could be exploited in three pre-diagnostics applications: 1) Detection of abnormalities in the brain with a helmet type of monitoring device, 2) Detection of breast cancer with a self-monitoring vest, 3) Detection of blood clots in leg with an antenna band. The technique is based on detecting differences in radio channel responses caused by the abnormalities having different dielectric properties than the surrounding tissues. Our results of realistic simulations and experimental measurements show that even small-sized abnormalities, e.g. tumors, can change channel characteristics in detectable level

An Ultrasonic Contactless Sensor for Breathing Monitoring

International audienceThe monitoring of human breathing activity during a long period has multiple fundamental applications in medicine. In breathing sleep disorders such as apnea, the diagnosis is based on events during which the person stops breathing for several periods during sleep. In polysomnography, the standard for sleep disordered breathing analysis, chest movement and airflow are used to monitor the respiratory activity. However, this method has serious drawbacks. Indeed, as the subject should sleep overnight in a laboratory and because of sensors being in direct contact with him, artifacts modifying sleep quality are often observed. This work investigates an analysis of the viability of an ultrasonic device to quantify the breathing activity, without contact and without any perception by the subject. Based on a low power ultrasonic active source and transducer, the device measures the frequency shift produced by the velocity difference between the exhaled air flow and the ambient environment, i.e., the Doppler effect. After acquisition and digitization, a specific signal processing is applied to separate the effects of breath from those due to subject movements from the Doppler signal. The distance between the source and the sensor, about 50 cm, and the use of ultrasound frequency well above audible frequencies, 40 kHz, allow monitoring the breathing activity without any perception by the subject, and therefore without any modification of the sleep quality which is very important for sleep disorders diagnostic applications. This work is patented (patent pending 2013-7-31 number FR.13/57569). OPE

Noncontact detection and analysis of respiratory function using microwave Doppler Radar

Real-time respiratory measurement with Doppler Radar has an important advantage in the monitoring of certain conditions such as sleep apnoea, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and many other general clinical uses requiring fast nonwearable and non-contact measurement of the respiratory function. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of using Doppler Radar in measuring the basic respiratory frequencies (via fast Fourier transform) for four different types of breathing scenarios: normal breathing, rapid breathing, slow inhalation-fast exhalation, and fast inhalation-slow exhalation conducted in a laboratory environment. A high correlation factor was achieved between the Doppler Radar-based measurements and the conventional measurement device, a respiration strap. We also extended this work from basic signal acquisition to extracting detailed features of breathing function (I: E ratio). This facilitated additional insights into breathing activity and is likely to trigger a number of new applications in respiratory medicine

Infrared Camera-Based Non-contact Measurement of Brain Activity From Pupillary Rhythms

Pupillary responses are associated with affective processing, cognitive function, perception, memory, attention, and other brain activities involving neural pathways. The present study aimed to develop a noncontact system to measure brain activity based on pupillary rhythms using an infra-red web camera. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and pupil imaging of 70 undergraduate volunteers (35 female, 35 male) were measured in response to sound stimuli designed to evoke arousal, relaxation, happiness, sadness, or neutral responses. This study successfully developed a real-time system that could detect an EEG spectral index (relative power: low beta in FP1; mid beta in FP1; SMR in FP1; beta in F3; high beta in F8; gamma P4; mu in C4) from pupillary rhythms using the synchronization phenomenon in harmonic frequency (1/100 f) between the pupil and brain oscillations. This method was effective in measuring and evaluating brain activity using a simple, low-cost, noncontact system, and may be an alternative to previous methods used to evaluate brain activity

Microstrip antenna design with improved fabrication tolerance for remote vital signs monitoring and WLAN/WPAN applications at mm-wave and THz frequencies

A novel approach is introduced to design microstrip patch antennas (MPAs) with improved fabrication tolerance for highly demanded Millimetre-wave (mm-wave) (30-300GHz) and Terahertz (THz) (0.3-3THz) frequency applications. The presented MP A designing method overcomes the challenges which exist with the fabrication and implementation of the conventional MP A designs at mm-wave and THz frequencies. The following research contributions have been added to the state-ofthe- art work: (i) designing of improved size MPAs at 60GHz, 1 OOGHz, 635GHz and 835GHz to prove the designing concept, (ii) detail measurements and analysis of Remote Vital Signs Monitoring (RVSM) with various sizes of the proposed MPA arrays at 60GHz for high detection accuracy and sensitivity, (iii) designing and tes~ing of MP As for 60GHz wireless local and personal area networks (WLAN/WP AN) in point-to-pint, point-to-multipoint and dual-band applications, (iv) implementation and testing of particular Partially Reflective Surface, Dielectric Lens and Defected Ground Structures on the proposed MP A designs with novel configurations at 60GHz for bandwidth and gain enhancement, and (v~ a comprehensive experimental study on the performance of large array designs with the proposed MP A elements for mm-wave applications. The mentioned research work is explained in the coming chapters in details. Moreover, all mentioned work has already been published

Bio-Radar

Mestrado em Engenharia Eletrónica e TelecomunicaçõesNesta dissertação é desenvolvido um protótipo de um bio-radar, cujo foco é a aquisição e processamento do sinal respiratório em tempo real. O sistema do bio-radar permite medir sinais vitais com precisão, baseando-se no princípio do efeito Doppler, que relaciona as propriedades do sinal recebido com a variação da distância percorrida desses sinais. Essa distância está compreendida entre as antenas do radar e a caixa torácica do paciente. No contexto deste projeto, é apresentado o modelo matemático do bio-radar e é também desenvolvido um algoritmo que visa extrair o sinal respiratório tendo em consideração a sensibilidade dos sinais envolvidos tal como o modo de operação do sistema. O protótipo em tempo real desenvolvido nesta dissertação usa um front-end baseado em Software Defined Radio (SDR) e os sinais por ele adquiridos são processados no software LabVIEW da National Instruments.In this dissertation, a prototype of a bio-radar was developed with focus in the real-time acquisition and processing of the respiratory signal. The bio-radar system can measure vital signals accurately by using the Doppler e ect principle that relates the received signal properties with the distance change between the radar antennas and the person's chest-wall. In this framework, a mathematical model of the bio-radar is presented. Also, an algorithm for respiratory rate extraction is proposed having in mind the acquired signal's sensitivity and the system's operation. The real-time acquisition system is developed using a front-end based in SDR and the acquired signals are processed using the LabVIEW software from National Instruments

1995 BRAC Commission

NAWC Point Mugu, and China Lake - Data Obtained During Site Visits, Santa Cruz Island. (Box 277