Principal Investigator: Assistant Professor Liu Yuxin, BME

Technologies to monitor physiologic signals during daily life provide the opportunity to monitor disease progression and deliver care outside of traditional clinical settings. Radio-frequency (RF) sensors represent an important class of physiologic monitors that can remotely detect vital signs with no patient effort and minimal privacy concern. However, their use in both wearable and ambient monitoring applications is currently limited by challenges in distinguishing physiologic signals from background interference. In particular, signals acquired by existing radar sensors represent the RF reflection averaged across the entire region of illumination, and are therefore confounded by motions of different body regions, objects in the environment, and other nearby persons. Here, we propose a RF sensing technology that overcomes these challenges using patterned conductive textiles to confine RF waves onto surfaces near the sensing target. These textile sensors can be worn on the body and embedded into the daily environment in objects such as beds, chairs, and tables. They can detect cardiopulmonary activity from specific body regions without mechanical coupling or background interference.