The international works of Daniela Lo Presti and Ambra Varalda supported by the Lazio Region scholarship
11 April 2017 - An smart sensorized shirt to monitor breathing and heart rate. He designed it Daniela Lo Presti, student UCBM which has reached theInstitut de Chirurgie Guidée par l'Image of Strasbourg, one of the most important French research centers for biomedical research. Together with her, he connects her Amber Varalda, to test a system monitoring of the effects caused by laser procedures applied in oncology.
On the two female students of the master's degree course in Biomedical Engineering, now graduates, bet the Lazio Region through the 'I'll be right back' scholarship, an initiative dedicated to financing higher education projects presented by young university students. Both winners of the call started from laboratory of Measurements and Biomedical Instrumentation UCBM, where – under the supervision of the Engineers Emiliano Schena e Carlo Massaroni - the ideas that first led them to a Strasbourg (coordinated here by the researcher Paola Saccomandi) and then toAeneas, in laboratory of Holographic Interferometry and Optical Fiber Sensors, directed by dr. Michael Caponero.
It is precisely there that dominates the two works optical fiber. In fact, they are placed in the sensorized shirt 13 fiber sensors which, starting from the deformations of the rib cage and the mechanical movement of the heart, return measurements of the respiratory and heart rate. In this way, it is possible to monitor the parameters even during an MRI examination since none of the materials involved interfere with the diagnostic technique. Among other things, tests carried out in Strasbourg on 7 healthy volunteers gave results comparable to gold standard, leading to a article in the IEEE Sensors Journal and two publications within theInternational Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference in which the scholars will participate as speakers in May.
Everlasting fiber optic sensors are applied to the instrumentation for laser procedures used in the surgical resection of some solid tumors. Given that in these cases it is still difficult to predict what the effects of the laser are on the damaged tissue, with the risk of proceeding on too small or too large portions, the system implemented by Ambra allows real-time monitoring through the punctual measurement of the temperature distribution. One study carried out for now only vitro e in vivo on an animal model but which could become a real clinical trial in the near future.
