About the session
Chairs: Anja K. Skrivervik (EPFL, Switzerland), J (Yiannis) Vardaxoglou (Loughborough University, United Kingdom)
Recently, wearable wireless devices have been widely used in our daily life. Also, implantable wireless devices have been developed and become available for various monitoring as well as identification systems. Unlike conventional wireless devices, wearable or implantable devices are used on or in the human body. In this sense, body-centric wireless communications (BCWCs) have become a very active area of research. On the other hand, radio-frequency or microwave medical devices used for cancer treatment and surgical operation have completely different functions. However, they are used on or in the human body. In terms of antennas installed inside the devices, such medical devices have lots of similarities to BCWCs. To design properly and to make the best use of specific antennas for different wireless devices, it is important to treat them as human-centric antennas. In general, the problem of an antenna placed on or in the human body can be treated as a so-called "boundary value problem" where the human body is considered as a lossy medium. However, in reality and simplicity, an individual case is treated appropriately in a specific manner by numerical simulation such as the FDTD technique. The paper introduces a few examples of wearable antennas as well as implantable antennas developed and tested in our laboratory. In addition, the paper describes some challenges of human-centric antennas.
This video covers the following topics: antennas; wearable antennas; wireless power transmission; antenna array; healthcare; Wi-Fi; hyperthermia; medical engineering.
