Nano-Antenna Directivity for Electromagnetic Propagation in WBANs

In-vivo sensing, diagnosis and treatment of diseases is having a great attention lately. With advanced computational systems, the processing of the biological data as well as the prediction of diagnosis is becoming more promising. However, the implementation of these systems inside the human body has a major challenge; modeling the communication channel. To overcome this problem, researchers are investigating the main factors that define the characteristics of the communication channel between nano-devices. In this work, we summarize the elements that contribute to the path loss encountered by an EM wave traveling in water, skin or epidermis. Then, the impact of nano-antenna directivity on the EM propagating wave is studied along with the frequency and the communication distance. The simulation results show that the nano-antenna directivity seems to have minor contributions 5 to 7 dB on the total path loss inside the human body with respect to the distance 2 to 30 dB and frequency 10 to 15 dB.Comment: 15 page

Design of a 1x4 CPW Microstrip Antenna Array on PET Substrate for Biomedical Applications

In this paper, a single layer Coplanar Waveguide-fed microstrip patch antenna array is presented for biomedical applications. The proposed antenna array is realized on a transparent and flexible Polyethylene Terephthalate substrate, has 1x4 radiating elements and measures only 280 x 192 mm2. The antenna array resonates at 2.68 GHz and has a peak-simulated gain of 10 dBi. A prototype is also fabricated, and the conductive patterns are drawn using cost-efficient adhesive copper foils instead of conventional copper or silver nanoparticle ink. The corresponding measured results agree well with the simulated results. The proposed low profile and cost-efficient transmit antenna array has the potential for wearable born-worn applications, including wireless powering of implantable medical devices.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Wearable, Epidermal, and Implantable Sensors for Medical Applications

Continuous health monitoring using wireless body area networks (WBANs) of wearable, epidermal and implantable medical devices is envisioned as a transformative approach to healthcare. Rapid advances in biomedical sensors, low-power electronics, and wireless communications have brought this vision to the verge of reality. However, key challenges still remain to be addressed. This paper surveys the current state-of-the-art in the area of wireless sensors for medical applications. Specifically, it focuses on presenting the recent advancements in wearable, epidermal and implantable technologies, and discusses reported ways of powering up such sensors. Furthermore, this paper addresses the challenges that exist in the various Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) layers and illustrates future research areas concerning the utilization of wireless sensors in healthcare applications.Comment: 48 page

Plasmonics Theory for Biosensor Design: Mathematical Formulations and Practical Applications

The last two decades have witnessed an exponential growth and tremendous developments in wireless technologies and systems, and their associated applications. In the recent years following 2006, there has been a great surge in interest in the newly emerging plasmonics nanotechnology because this new device technology provides tremendous synergy between electronic and photonic devices. Electronics devices are down-scalable up to the nanoscale size but have limited processor speed due to thermal and signal delay issues associated with electronic devices. On the other hand, photonic devices have extremely high speed and high data carrying capacity but are limited in size to the diffraction law such that the size of a photonic device should be equal to about half of its operational wavelength. The size mismatch between electronic devices and photonic devices inhibits the advantageous interfacing between these two device technologies and here plasmonics nanotechnology plays the important role of interfacing these two technologies. Plasmonics technology provides high speed interconnections with high data carrying capacity between nano-scale electronic devices opening a new field of research which is on-chip high speed nano-networks [28]. It is this great advantage of plasmonics technology that made it a very interesting technology for implementation for the design of a miniature real-time biosensor. In our plasmonic biosensor design, we utilized a subset of plasmonics technology which is surface plasmon wave generation in order to continuously monitor the concentration of a desired analyte