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Workshop on:

"Electromagnetic Issues in Advanced Mobile
Healthcare Applications"

CFP

In recent years, it has been shown that Information and Communication Technology, ICT, can dramatically improve medical monitoring systems, disease diagnosis and treatment, home-monitoring applications, and other healthcare delivery systems. All this would result in higher patient-satisfaction scores as well as cost reduction and efficiency improvement for healthcare providers. Moreover, the recent developments on compact and low-power consumption wireless electronic devices is pushing industries to go on the market with novel, integrated, low-cost and easy-to-manage healthcare systems.

On the other hand, above wireless-based systems have to face with technological limits and challenging problems related to radiation, propagation, reception and scattering of electromagnetic waves. Healthcare delivery systems often need for accurate localization and tracking of the patient in complex indoor environments, so requiring the development and testing of efficient radiolocation techniques. Moreover, compact wearable antennas are required in body-centric communications, with severe constraints on radiation pattern, gain and frequency bandwidth. Also, wireless wearable devices operating close to the human body arise issues related to NIR dosimetry and hearing aid compatibility. Finally, since medical diagnosis and treatment techniques continuously require for high performance RF and microwave biomedical sensors and apparatus, novel technologies should be investigated and tested. In this context, UWB and Terahertz applications, RFID technologies, wireless sensor networks, MIMO systems are going to be deeply investigated by researchers in the field of EM applications in biomedical engineering.

In this framework, the Workshop is aimed at presenting the most recent solutions for solving some of the EM issues arising when developing and implementing advanced wireless healthcare applications.

• Electromagnetic compatibility for medical devices
• Techniques and algorithms for indoor radiolocation
• EM propagation modeling in indoor environments
• Antenna design and propagation modeling for on-body and intra-body communication systems
• RFID applications in biomedical engineering
• Electromagnetic dosimetry: analytical and experimental results, numerical modeling, in-vitro exposure systems
• RF and microwaves for medical devices
• Near-field coupling in biomedical applications

Submission Instructions

Papers should be submitted to OpenConf by 30 June 2011, by selecting the workshop link in the "Topic Area" list.

Chair

Paolo Nepa received the doctor degree in electronic engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1990. He became an Assistant Professor at the same university in 1993. In 1998, he was at the ElectroScience Laboratory, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA, as a Visiting Scholar supported by a grant of the Italian National Research Council. At the ESL, he was involved in research on efficient hybrid techniques for the analysis of electrically large antenna arrays. Since April 2002, he has been an Associate Professor at the University of Pisa, giving courses on antenna and propagation, electromagnetic fields, non-ionizing radiations. His research activities have been concerned with: high frequency asymptotic techniques for EM diffraction and their application to the implementation of deterministic ray-tracing-based propagation models for indoor and outdoor communication and radiolocation systems; antennas for base stations and mobile terminals of communication systems, near-field focused planar antenna; antenna design and propagation modeling for wireless body area networks (WBANs) and RFID systems; radiolocation of wireless sensors and UHF-RFID tags. He is coauthor of more than 60 technical papers in international journals and 130 refereed conference papers. He received a Young Scientist Award from the International Union of Radio Science, Commission B, in 1998.