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

Abstract

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.

Realistic 3D Phantoms for Validation of Microwave Sensing in Health Monitoring Applications

“…This paper is an extension of and complement to our previous studies [15,51,52]. The first objective of this paper is to present a new approach for developing and evaluating realistic emulation platforms for human head and torso areas.…”

“…Studies in the literature propose that a better resolution can be achieved with microwaves at higher frequencies as a result of a specific correlation between water content and electromagnetic field at such high frequencies. During the past decade, several microwave techniques-based studies have been proposed for different medical and healthcare applications [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 ]. Some of these studies have also focused on the development of phantom models for microwave systems.…”