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Editorial Special Issue on Sensors for Noninvasive Physiological Monitoring
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OR centuries before modern medical instrumentation was developed, human physiological monitoring has been carried out by the ability of the physician to detect specific external signs in order to establish an appropriate diagnosis. This aspect belongs to a special branch of medicine called Semeiotics that deals with detection of external elements for symptomatology. As our knowledge of complex disease etiology has increased, medical semiotics is no longer sufficient to diagnose modern ailments, even in case of experienced doctor; the use of physiological monitoring instrumentation is needed to achieve our goals. Hence, noninvasive physiological monitoring is one of the most important areas of increasing development in biomedical engineering. The need for noninvasive physiological monitoring has been a goal for some time, but there were many technical limitations in the past that limited development of this new category of tools. Some of these limitations have now been solved and addressed thanks to new discoveries and advances in the fields of measurement technology, material science, micro/nanotechnologies, electronics, signal processing, diagnosis approaches, and image processing capabilities – just to name a few. Material science has a huge impact on fabrication of suitable devices for the many purposes of noninvasive monitoring. Micro- and nanoscale technologies are also of large importance, and we gain advantages in both performance, size, power, and lower costs through mass production. Many signals, gathered from patients are small amplitude and frequently contain noise contaminants; thus, they need further processing to reveal the appropriate information content relevant for medical diagnostics. Imaging is also a very interesting branch of noninvasive monitoring of physiological data allowing insight into the human body, and advances in this area are very relevant to modern diagnostic methods. The aforementioned advances allow us to noninvasively monitor many physiological parameters and to develop new devices and instrumentation to examine the function of many diverse physiological systems, namely, heart, brain, foetus, body motion, kidney, blood, breathing, lungs, skin, eyes – again, naming only a few applications. This Special Issue has shown the interest of international scientific community working on the topic, and we received manuscript submissions on almost every topic of noninvasive sensing, including: technology infrastructure, software issues, sensors and sensing systems. Wireless sensor networks are particularly interesting, and there is an urgent and growing need for this technology in the area of health monitoring and medical telemetry. This has been greatly facilitated by advances in the biological sensor research area. Health monitoring for both routine and critical Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2011.2168299
life-threatening purposes may both be equally of interest, and there are still remaining technical constraints that should be studied in more depth, including: lowering overall power consumption, increased security measures for critical data, adaptability to various network configurations, increased data throughput, and message latency. Seeing the index of works that were selected for final publication, most of subtopics of the call for papers have been covered by very high quality contributions. We warmly thank the Editor-in-Chief and the IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL staff for their help and assistance to form this Special Issue and in managing the manuscript review processes. We thank all people who submitted their work for consideration, both those accepted and rejected, in the effort to preserve the high quality and the reputation of the host journal. In total, we received 92 manuscripts for initial consideration in this issue. We received submission from many different countries and continents, demonstrating the substantial global research activity in this area and that the IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL is a worldwide publication venue for this topic. Aimé Lay-Ekuakille, Guest Editor University of Salento Department of Innovation Engineering Lecce 73100, Italy
[email protected] Cristina Davis, Guest Editor University of California, Davis Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Davis, CA 95616 USA
[email protected] Olfa Kanoun, Guest Editor Chemnitz University of Technology Chemnitz 09126, Germany
[email protected] Zhihong Li, Guest Editor Peking University Microelectronis Institute of Microelectronics Beijing 100871, China
[email protected] Antonio Trabacca, Guest Editor Scientific Institute – I.R.C.C.S. “E. Medea” Unit of Neurorehabilitation 23842 Bosisio Parini (Lecco), Italy
[email protected]
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Aimé Lay-Ekuakille (M’08) received the M.S. degree in electronic engineering, the M.S. degree in clinical engineering, the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from the Polytechnic of Bari, Bari, Italy, the Post degree in environmental impact assessment from the University of Bari, Bari. He has been Director of different private companies in the field of industrial plants, environment measurements, nuclear and biomedical measurements. He was Director of the Health and Environment Municipal Department. He has been a Technical Advisor for the Italian Government for high risk plants. He continues to serve as a Scientific Advisor for private and public Institutions. From 1993 up to 2001, he was Adjunct Professor of Measurements and Control Systems at the University of Calabria, the University of Basilicata, and Polytechnic of Bari. He joined the Department of Innovation Engineering (University of Salento) in September 2000 in the Measurement and Instrumentation Group. Since 2003, he has been the leader of the scientific group; hence he is the coordinator of the Measurement and Instrumentation Lab in Lecce. He has been appointed as UE Commission Senior Expert for FP-VI (2004–2009). He is Chair of the IEEE-sponsored SCI/SSD Conference and member of the Transactions on Systems, Signals and Devices (SSD) Editorial Board (Germany), Associate Editor of the International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems, Associate Editor of other international journals, Guest Editor of the IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL. He is the founder and the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Measurement Technologies and Instrumentation Engineering (IJMTIE) published by the US IGI Global (Hershey, PA, USA). He is the Honorary Editor-in-Chief of the Micro and NanoSensing Journal to be published in 2012 by Global Research Publications (India). He serves as Academic and Scientific Advisor of MultiMedia University of Nairobi (Kenya, since 2010), where he is an Adjunct Associate Professor. He authored and coauthored more than 130 papers on international journals and proceedings. He also authored and coauthored four international books. His main researches regard environmental and biomedical instrumentation and measurements even using nanotechnology devices, Nanoinstrumentation. Dr. Lay-Ekuakille is a member of different international TCs: Imeko TC19 Environmental Measurements as voting member, IEEE EMBS WBSS as voting member, IEEE IMS TC-25 Subcommittee on Blood Pressure Measurement, IEEE IMS TC-34 Nanotechnology in Instrumentation and Measurements.
Cristina Davis (M’09) received the B.S. degree with a double major in mathematics and biology from Duke University, Durham, NC, in 1994, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, in 1996 and 1999, respectively. She is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis, where her research program focuses on design and implementation of chemical and biological sensors using micro- and nanofabrication technologies. She trained as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, from 1999 to 2001. She then worked in industry for over half a decade designing and implementing sensors systems. She has been at the University of California, Davis, since 2005.
Olfa Kanoun received the M.Sc. degree from the Technische Universität, Munich, Germany, and the Ph.D. degree in 2001 from the Institute for Measurement and Automation, Universität der Bundeswehr München, München, Germany. She was awarded from the Commission of Professors in Measurement Technology (AHMT) in Germany for the best dissertation in 2001. In 2002, she founded the research group on impedance spectroscopy at the Institute for Measurement and Automation, University of the Bundeswehr. Since 2007, she has been a Professor at Chemnitz University of Technology at the Head of the Chair for Measurement and Sensor Technology (MST). Her main research fields are impedance spectroscopy, energy harvesting, and sensors based on carbon nanotubes. Prof. Kanoun founded the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Chapter within the IEEE Section, Germany, in 2004. She is the Chair of the IEEE Chapter on Instrumentation and Measurement in Germany since 2005 and member of the IMEKO Technical Committees TC-4 and TC-19. She is General Chair of the International Multi Conference on Systems, Signals and Devices (SSD), the Workshop on Energy Harvesting, and the International Workshop on Impedance Spectroscopy. She is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Transactions on Systems, Signals and Devices and served as guest editor for several international scientific journals.
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Zhihong Li received the B.S. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China, in 1992 and the Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Microelectronics, Peking University, majoring in VLSI technology and reliability, in 1997. In 1997, he joined the MEMS Group, Institute of Microelectronics, Peking University. He was a Visiting Scholar at Cornell University and the University of California, Davis, from 2000 to 2004, respectively. Presently, he is a Professor at the MEMS Research Center, Institute of Microelectronics, Peking University. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and given more than ten invited speeches in international conferences and workshops. His research interests include design and fabrication of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), especially bio-MEMS and RF MEMS. Dr. Li was the Co-Chair of the Technical Program Committee at IEEE NEMS’09. He has been a member of the Technical Program Committee at IEEE Sensors’08–11, IEEE MEMS’ 10, and Transducers’11.
Antonio Trabacca was born in Brindisi, Italy, on November 2, 1962. He received a Degree in medicine and surgery from the University of Bari, Bari, Italy, in 1990, a Post-graduate degree in neurology from the University of Bari in 1995, Postdoctoral training in electromyography and neurophysiology at the University of Ferrara, Ferrara, italy, in 1996, and the M.S. degree in health management at the SDA–Bocconi School of Management, Milano, Italy, in 2002. From 1996 to to 1998, he was Assistant Neurologist at the “A. Di Summa” Hospital of Brindisi. At present, he is Head Physician of the Unit of Neurorehabilitation I (Developmental Neurology and Functional Rehabilitation), at the Scientific Institute I.R.C.C.S. “Eugenio Medea” – Association “La Nostra Famiglia,” Ostuni – Brindisi – Brindisi Research Center. He is Health Director of the Institute I.R.C.C.S. “Eugenio Medea” – Ostuni – Brindisi. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Scientific Institute I.R.C.C.S. “E. Medea.” He is a member of GIPCI (Italian Group of Cerebral Palsy – Mariani Foundation), the Italian Society of Neurology (SIN), the European Epilepsy Academy (EUREPA), and the Italian League against. Epilepsy (LICE). He is head of current investigations under the auspices of the Italian Ministry of Health. He is author of several papers of neurologic matter including original articles, communications to international and Italian congresses. Currently, he is actively working to further research in paediatric epileptology, electroencephalography, and clinical neurophysiology and in advanced MRI techniques to determine the structural changes in brain structure related to normal brain development.
