Smaller, more efficient, more effective: researchers around the globe are working to find ways to make sensors and other Health Tech systems better. This is especially true for devices worn on — or in — the body. Scientists at the University of Technology Eindhoven in the Netherlands are pursuing projects that address several issues:
- Smartness: reducing interference in wireless radios using adaptive components
- Wake-up radios: using extremely low-power receivers to “wake up” transceivers only when needed
- Beam steering: reducing radio power requirements by aiming the transmissions at the receiver
- Optical communications: using light instead of radio portions of the electromagnetic spectrum for higher data rates
- Self-powered chips: integrating energy harvesting, radio antennae, and all other system circuits on a single chip to greatly reduce device size and power requirements
These avenues of research could help lead to networks of sensors on the body that communicate with each other to gather biometric data that can be delivered wirelessly to the Cloud for analysis, and possibly even resulting in instructions sent to worn devices to treat conditions.
