Episode 543 - Monitoring vital signs without getting in the way

Getting an accurate picture of someone's health or vital signs is essential in medicine, but hard to physically do without wires. Invasive health monitoring systems can't provide insights into 'everyday' scenarios. Trying to assess someone's posture, gait and rehabilitation is hard if they're wired into a harness. Smart Pants using fibre optics can help rehabilitation by fully understanding the problem points in high detail. Non-contact monitoring of breathing and other vital signs is important in a hospital setting to reduce risk, but camera based solutions are too variable. How can you 'remove the wires' in a hospital setting? By using LiDAR and RF radar.  Leticia Avellar, Anselmo Frizera, Arnaldo Leal-Junior. POF Smart Pants: a fully portable optical fiber-integrated smart textile for remote monitoring of lower limb biomechanics. Biomedical Optics Express, 2023; 14 (7): 3689 DOI: 10.1364/BOE.492796 Ziqian Zhang, Yang Liu, Tegan Stephens, Benjamin J. Eggleton. Photonic radar for contactless vital sign detection. Nature Photonics, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41566-023-01245-6