New testing chamber enables wireless communication through human body fat
Researchers have built a portable testing chamber that validates a emerging medical technology using human fat tissue to transmit signals to implanted devices. The breakthrough could enable doctors to monitor brain, heart, and metabolic conditions without surgery, opening a new market for remote patient monitoring and reducing reliance on traditional wireless implants.
Originaltitel: Realization of a Portable Semi-Shielded Chamber for Evaluation of Fat-Intrabody Communication
<p> In this work, a customized portable semi-shielded chamber for torso phantoms to evaluatefat-intrabody communication (Fat-IBC) is presented. Fat-IBC is a technology where human fat tissue isused for microwave communication with intrabody medical devices. The potential clinical applications arevast including central nervous system (brain and spine) communication, cardiovascular disease monitoringand metabolic disorder control. However, validating this technology needs assurance that the signal leakagethrough undesired paths, particularly surface waves and reflections, does not occur. To solve this issue,an effective technique involving a modified design of a semi-shielded chamber is presented. The cross-section of the torso phantoms is about 25 cm × 35 cm and the height about 20 cm. As specified by ISO3745:2012, the maximum object volume that can be measured in a chamber is 5% of the chamber’s internalnet volume. Therefore, the dimensions of the semi-shielded chamber was set to 100 cm × 60 cm × 60 cm.The semi-shielded chamber was constructed out of a wooden crate, covered on the inside with microwaveabsorbers and with thin aluminum sheets on the outside. The experimental evaluation of the semi-shieldedchamber was validated according to standards such as EN 50147-1:1996, IEC 61000-4-3:2020, and IECCISPR 16-1-4:2019. The torso phantom was positioned at the center of the chamber, with a separation wallto ensure signal transmission solely through the phantoms interior and not its surface or chamber walls. Theseparation wall can be modified either to be conformal to the phantom sample or serve as a solid partitiondividing the chamber into two separate volumes for performance measurement. The separation wall wasfound to have a shielding attenuation of 30 dB to 60 dB for frequencies between 0.7 GHz and 18 GHz,respectively, while the corresponding values for the external walls were found to be 45 dB to 70 dB. Thesemi-shielded chamber realized in this work is useful for Fat-IBC technology, brain-computer interface,brain-machine interface, body area networks (BANs), and related applications.</p>