Description of Research:
Annually there are over 72 million instances of acute wounds from accidents or surgical procedures, and chronic wounds affect approximately 6.5 million patients in the US. These wounds are covered by wound dressings for an improved healing process. This passive function of the current generation of bandages can be augmented by recent advances in wearable electronics and wireless communication. Smart bandages that can monitor the healing process and provide real-time therapy while being applied to a wound are currently being developed. In order to offer this additional functionality, these bandages need to be able to communicate with the environment. This wireless communication is studied in this project.
Smart bandages can be placed anywhere on the body and will not have much energy available. Therefore, an efficiently designed network of nodes on the body, a so-called Body Area Network (BAN), is required as an intermediary in the communication between the bandages and the wireless network. In this project, the on-body placement of the BAN and the antennas that are used for the wireless communication in the BAN will be studied, in order to optimize the communication between the bandages and the environment.
Eventually, this project will enable the usage of smart bandages and will contribute towards a better therapy and comfort for a large and growing number of patients.
UGent PI: Arno Thielens
Arno Thielens received the M.Sc. degree in engineering (applied physics) from Ghent University in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree in applied physics from Ghent University, in 2015. His research focused on personal exposure assessment to radio-frequency electromagnetic fields and numerical dosimetry. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Institute for Science and Innovation, Flanders, Belgium, from 2016 to 2017 at Waves (Information Technology Department, UGent). In 2017, he joined the Berkeley Wireless Research Center, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, where he is involved in the development of the human intranet. This research was founded by an FWO [PEGASUS]² Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship and an Honorary Fellowship by the Belgian American Education Foundation. Since 2020, he is a senior Postdoctoral Fellow of the FWO. He is an associate professor at Ghent University since 2018.
Dr. Thielens was a recipient of the Joseph James Morrissey Memorial Award issued by the Bioelectromagnetics Society and the European Bio Electromagnetics Association in 2013. He received the 2015 International Union of Radio Science [Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale or (URSI)] Young Scientist Award. Dr. Thielens also won the Alessandro Chiabrera Award for Excellence in Bioelectromagnetics at BioEM 2019 in Montpellier, France. This prize has the purpose to keep alive Prof. Chiabrera’s memory and scientific legacy, as well as to foster excellence in the Bioelectromagnetics community, by giving recognition to outstanding scientific contributions from early stage researchers.
Berkeley PI: Jan Rabaey
Jan Rabaey received his Ph.D degree in applied sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. After being connected to UC Berkeley as a Visiting Research Engineer, he was a research manager at IMEC, Belgium. In 1987, he joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department of the University of California, Berkeley, where he now holds the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship. From 1999 until 2002, he served as the Associate Chair of the EECS Dept of UC Berkeley. He is currently the scientific co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC), as well as the director of the FCRP Multiscale Systems Research Center (MuSyC).
FWO [Pegasus]²