nepa 2011 - International Workshop on: "Electromagnetic Issues in Advanced Mobile Healthcare Applications"

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.

Topics covered (but not limited to):
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