Confined Intra-Arm Communication for Medical Applications

Trang Thai Georgia Institute of Technology

Gerald DeJean, Ran Gilad-BachrachMicrosoft Research

• Noscomial infections (fungal or bacterial) lead to almost 100,000 deaths per year

• An important goal is the detection of the root cause of infections caused by handshakes, touching of equipment and/or object in buildings

Application to Detection of Infections

Technological Motivation

[*] Katsuyuki Fujii, Masaharu Takahashi, and Koichi Ito, “Electric Field Distributions of Wearable Devices Using the Human Body as a Transmission Channel”, IEEE Trans. Ant. Prop. Vol 55, No. 7, Jul 2007.

Ground layer “outer conductor”

On skin modified “coaxial” channel on the arm model

Feed wire where signal is launched into the transmission line

Regular coaxial cable

Equivalent circuit representation of a coaxial transmission line

musclefat

skin

Proposed Concept

Signal layer “inner conductor”

8 mm distance => field drops-30dB to -50dB

Electric Field Distributions

Prototypes and Lab Setup