METAMATERIAL-BASED TECHNOLOGIES FOR WIRELESS PHYSIOLOGICAL SENSING

Abstract

Wireless physiological sensing can empower preventive and personalized healthcare by facilitating early illness detection and proactive chronic disease management. However, current wireless physiological sensing strategies rely on capturing surface-level manifestations of biological processes, resulting in signals with limited clinical fidelity. This thesis proposes two metamaterial-based wireless sensing techniques to directly extract physiological information from within the body. In the first technique, cascaded metasurfaces are synthesized to provide reflectionless wireless transmission between air and the human body. By enhancing the field intensity transmitted into the body, this approach facilitates efficient operations of deep-tissue implants and direct wireless acquisition of inner-body physiological signals. In the second technique, a near-field sensing modality based on spoof surface plasmon metamaterials is developed to detect subtle cardiopulmonary-mediated permittivity modulations inside tissue, enabling unobtrusive sensing of multi-site physiological signals, including continuous blood pressure. Taken together, this work demonstrates the potential of metamaterials for advanced wireless physiological sensing.