Leader: Sandra Costanzo (UNICAL); Other collaborator(s):
The Task is specifically focused on the application of microwave technologies for the design of smart healthcare environments, by including two main activities. The first one is related to the design and realization of wearable microwave sensors for non-contact biomedical monitoring, auxilied by Artificial Intelligence methods for accurate diagnosis and prediction. The second activity will exploit the usage of smart electromagnetic environments, based on the adoption of microwave metasurfaces, for the monitoring and control of environmental parameters, as well as for energy harvesting scope.
In the reference period (November 2023-March 2024), the research activity has ben mainly addressed to the development of an analytical approach for the response optimization of microwave sensors adopted for biomedical applications. In particular, a state-of-art study has been conducted, and a numerical analysis has been performed, whose results have been discussed in the following paper, submitted for publication on international journal: "Analytical Approach to Coupling Medium Identification for the Response Optimization of Microwave Sensors Radiation into Biological Media,” submitted to IEEE J-ERM.
Main policy, industrial and scientific implications:
The results coming from the research conducted in the reference period (November 2023-March 2024) may have a significant innovative impact on the design procedure of microwave sensors for biomedical applications, as leading to the development of a fast analytical method to realize the optimization of microwave sensor response when working in the presence of human body, thus implying more accurate results in the reconstruction of biomedical parameters
Please see the next reporting period.
The research activity has been devoted to the following tasks:
a) analysis, design and numerical simulations of a microwave planar sensor working at two industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) frequency bands (i.e. 0.92 GHz and 2.45 GHz) and providing high stability in terms of Q-factor parameter;
b) development of a mathematical model for the prediction of microwave sensors response in the presence of arbitrary coupling medium with the human body.
More specifically, in task a) the dual-band behavior for the microwave sensor is achieved by exploiting a shorting pin loaded effect in a simple microstrip structure; moreover, a in-depth numerical analysis has been conducted to demonstrate that the proposed design procedure is able to provide a sensor with a stable resonant behavior (stable Q-factor) and the ability to discriminate among different types of investigated materials. In task b), an analytical formulation for the radiation from an arbitrary aperture sensor configuration into a multilayered dielectric media is conceived. In particular, to evaluate the role of the coupling medium, the terminating aperture admittance is computed under the assumption that only the dominant mode is propagating into the waveguide sensor. Explicit admittance expressions are examined in detail for rectangular waveguides. In particular, by considering biological tissues, it is shown that the reflection coefficient derived from the proposed fast analysis method is in agreement with the results achieved by full wave simulations via the CST electromagnetic solver. Moreover, it is shown that the proposed approach is valid in general, and it can be applied for a variety of aperture antennas. The usefulness of the method has been validated with examples of practical interest. In particular, starting from admittance, the reflection coefficient of a rectangular aperture antenna fed by a rectangular waveguide and radiating into biological tissues has been calculated for a few interesting profiles typical in medical applications.
The research activity has been devoted to the theoretical study and development of an analytical approach for the prediction of microwave sensor radiation into multilayered dielectric media representing the biological tissues. More specifically, microwave sensors in waveguide technology with arbitrary cross section are considered. Under the assumption that only the dominant mode propagates into the waveguides, explicit admittance expressions are presented, which can be directly reated to the microwave sensors response. The achieved numerical results confirmed the usefulness of the proposed analytical method, which can be considered as a first quick tool for the sensor desing, thus reducing the high computational cost of standard full wave analysis approach.
Scientific publications
Dissemination events