Take-Home Messages

• A wearable device was developed with electromagnetic sensors in order to non-invasively monitor the progress of brain atrophy and lateral ventricle enlargement as a result of Alzheimer’s disease.
• The developed wearable RF device is capable of detecting the progression of brain atrophy and lateral ventricle enlargement successfully.
• The work in this study targets Alzheimer’s disease and aims to develop a non-invasive device for monitoring the progression of the disease in patients.
• The breakthrough in this work is the development of a wearable device that uses RF sensors for detecting changes in the brain as a result of Alzheimer’s disease.

Take-Home Messages

• In this manuscript, body temperature and sweat sensors are integrated with a textile NFC antenna, which eliminates the need for external batteries and realizes real-time wireless monitoring.
• This paper has presented design, fabrication implementation, measurements and real-life applications of smart textile NFC antennas and a battery-free wireless NFC body temperature and sweat sensing device, aiming for truly ubiquitous wireless health and wellbeing monitoring.
• The proposed device targets at body temperature and sweat loss monitoring for daily healthcare, systemic hyperthermia from fever, sweating symptoms caused by various kinds of infection, inflammation and trauma and wound healing monitoring.
• Different from conventional battery enabled and wire connected sensors, the significance of this work is by applying textile NFC as a communication interface as well as a wireless power harvester, battery-free real-time body temperature and sweat monitoring has been realized simultaneously.
• Apart from the device itself, an App has also been developed on Android system for the sensor data to be accessed by smart phones.

Take-Home Messages

• Microwave-induced thermoacoustic imaging (MITAI) is applied to monitor microwave power deposition distribution in human breast during the process of focused microwave breast hyperthermia (FMBH).
• Compressive sensing (CS) based MITAI technique is able to provide reliable power deposition monitoring for the iterative focusing process of the FMBH approach under the condition that the obtainable focusing is good enough.
• Focused microwave breast hyperthermia (FMBH) for treating breast tumors noninvasively.
• This work presents the first systematic computational study for assessing performance and robustness of the MITAI monitored FMBH modality, referred to as FMBH-MITAI modality, utilizing realistic human breast phantoms with different densities and tumor locations.

Take-Home Messages

• An inductively-coupled resonator assembly is shown to allow the detection of significantly sub-wavelength diameter biological cells by combining the strong field confinement provided by a split ring resonator with the high quality factor resonance of a dielectric resonator.
• Measurements of single, free-flowing cells in a natural aqueous environment at ~10 GHz have been carried out using a coupled resonator sensor, without the need for trapping, immobilizing, culturing or fixing cells in high-field areas.
• The coupled resonator approach proposed in this work shows potential as a method of discrimination of cells based on hydration levels, which in other works has been linked to carcinogenesis, as well as cancer aggressiveness grade; therefore the sensor described herein may represent an alternative method of cancer diagnosis or disease progression monitoring via non-invasive liquid biopsies.
• In this paper, measurements of living, free-flowing, single cells in aqueous buffer solution, at a frequency sensitive to cell water content, have been made.
• The inductive coupling employed in this sensor allows for physical separation of the sensing elements from microwave electronics, allowing for cheap, disposable chips to be used with biological fluids.

Take-Home Messages

• This is first time to model the performance of implantable PV cells in different layers of tissue. We demonstrate how the electrical characteristics are influenced by the implanting location of the device.
• A PV cell implanted in the dermis layer can harvest the greatest amount of power.
• We propose implanting our energy harvesting PV cells in the hypodermis layer.
• Our proposed PV device harvests enough energy to supply power for low-cost implants such as cardiac pacemakers, retinal implants or biomedical sensors.
• PV cells implanted in the adipose layer can harvest nearly 11.84 mW using an 850 nm light source.

Take-Home Messages

• Four quantities, namely 1) the net dissipated power around an electrode of an active implantable medical device (AIMD), 2) the net temperature increase, 3) the current flowing from the lead into the electrode, and 4) the net specific absorption rate (SAR) increase, were numerically compared for a set of leads with straight and helical wires to evaluate the lead electromagnetic model (LEM) with respect to radio frequency energy-induced heating.
• The most suitable sensor locations were positions from the electrode tip along the first half of the electrode axial axis. A temperature sensor was essential if the net electrode temperature increase required evaluation.
• The targeted medical application is an evaluation of heating induced by radio frequency energy that appears in human tissue near an AIMD during magnetic resonance imaging.
• For leads with helical wire, our results indicate that 1) to achieve a good validation of the transfer function, that is, the linear regression coefficient of determination R2 to be close to 1, the temperature sensor results must be obtained as fast as possible, but 2) the total transient time must be longer than 360 seconds for evaluation of the LEM calibration factor.
• Utilization of result analysis made for generic leads with straight wire can be significantly misleading for predicting results for leads with helical wires.