Table of Content
Health Technologies
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Publications Project
Introduction The main goal of the Publications Project is to promote the technical aspect of our Association through various publications. Our publications consist of a number of articles written by the members of our Content team, with the contribution of the Project’s board and other EESTEC members, at times. These publications are aimed at students from EESTEC and outside of EESTEC who are great EECS enthusiasts. Also, they can be used for external promotion among potential partners, showing them our interest and devotion to our brand.
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Project functions upon three parts’ collaborations and contributions - Content team, Public Relations team with coordinators and Design coordinator. The focus of this Project is to create professional content and ensure its distribution inside and outside the network, in an effort to strengthen our brand and academic identity.
Winter Call for team members is near - JOIN US! If you have any additional questions, write to us on publications-board@eestec.net.
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Publications Project
Meet the Board Lazarela Rudic Leader
Silvia Virtosu Design Coordinator
Pelin Akalin Content Coordinator
Beyda Dilbilir PR Coordinator
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Meet the PR Team
Melihcan Eris
Eren Uzunoglu
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Meet the Content Team
Andreea Nica
Anupama Vashishtha
Armando Rodrigues
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Gonzalo Sรกenz de Ugarte
Mihai Butnariu
Mihajlo Milosavljevic
Taylan Yesilyurt
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IoT in Healthcare Author: Armando Rodrigues
Health Technologies
Io… What? IoT is taking over the tech world. But how is it influencing other areas? Everything’s gone wireless these days, and healthcare is starting to join the rush!
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a set of reasonably recent web, software, and hardware technologies that allow everyday objects to be connected through the internet. Adding connectivity to the things we use every day opens a whole new world of possibilities. It makes items way more enjoyable by allowing them to “talk” to other objects like your phone or laptop. This new wireless connectivity level enables you to pay for your favorite drink using your phone at the nearest vending machine. Or even know how many people are in the library before getting there and finding whether there is a free parking slot near your university. IoT turns usually “dumb” things into more connected and smart pieces of technology. But what is it doing for healthcare?
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The age of IoT wearables The future of healthcare technologies is a beautiful mystery yet to be fully comprehended. But it’s safe to say IoT wearables will be a big part of it. Wearables are electronics printed in tiny flexible PCBs that are made for you to wear. These wearables include the blood oxygen sensor you might have on your wristwatch or even your latest fitness band. Bringing IoT to wearables means we can have our bodies full of sensors. But not just that, we can connect them to our phones and computers! In healthcare, this means that it is much easier for you to follow your diet because your phone knows when to alert you about exercising, drinking water, or even keeping count on the calories you have ingested! The elderly become less prone to forgetting about their medicine because their pills dispenser is connected to the internet and sounds an alarm for them to take their pills. It can also alert their families if they have forgotten to take their medication.
Hospital management and health monitoring As the number of covid cases rises, the stress on national health systems and hospitals is tremendous. Hospital management and patient health monitoring is a delicate subject. We need to make sure that every patient gets the best service possible, but we also need to help as many as possible. Monitoring vitals from hundreds of d ifferent patients at the same time could be extremely easy, assuming the vitals monitoring devices in the bed of each patient are RF capable and have wifi or ethernet connectivity.
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But as if that wasn’t already cool enough, you don’t even need to monitor just the patients at the hospital! Doctors could monitor health data from everyone that has internet access. But what if you are in the middle of nowhere. Let’s say, 200Km from the nearest network access point. There’s no way you could connect patients that far-right? Wrong!
LoRa: the last step for IoT to conquer the world LoRa stands for Long Range, and it’s a wireless low power technology that exchanges speed and packet size for distance and energy efficiency. It makes the transmission of information over crazy long distances possible, and you need to make your data packet small enough and send it slowly enough (assuming you have a line of sight)! This technology is perfect for monitoring applications in healthcare, involving long distances. It could be a way to connect patients in distant and remote rural areas with doctors in cities. A LoRa transmitter could send patient data, like vitals, a few times per day and trigger an alarm system in a far away resourceful city if something were to go wrong, automatically asking for an ambulance. LoRa devices usually enter deep sleep in-between transmissions, and the sending of information itself wastes very little energy. This deep sleep makes it possible for these devices to work for days on a single battery and potentially indefinitely when using solar panels or other energy harvesting technologies to charge the battery. LoRaWAN stands for LoRa Wide Area Network and is a wireless communication standard for low power WANs.
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LoRaWAN is the upper layer protocol that supports the existence of the LoRa device network. Using these technologies, we could connect thousands of patients and doctors, kilometers apart, in places where internet connectivity is non-existent.
A bright future to come During these dark times of pandemics, the internet has played a crucial role in people’s personal lives and jobs. And as time goes by, it becomes apparent that IoT will be of the utmost importance if we want to keep saving people’s lives, managing healthcare systems, and creating highly efficient health solutions. IoT is all about connecting people and objects. And who knows, maybe in the future, being healthy will not be just about vaccines or treatments. Possibly connectivity will also be a part of it all.
To stay healthy, we better stay connected!
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Health Technologies on ISS Author: Mihai Butnariu
Introduction In the last 100 years, we have made significant flight and medicine steps, from flying in a winged wooden skeleton to landing on the moon and having a billionaire launching his car into space. At the same time, medicine evolved to give millions of people hope of a better life. No more someone will die from HIV, and there is better hope that paralyzed people might get their senses back. What do these two topics have in common? The fact that at this very moment, six people orbit the Earth in a capsule named ISS. The actual problem is that our bodies work differently in space than on Earth, so medical issues have to be tackled differently.
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The medical problems of space Orbiting the Earth in 0 gravity has a severe effect on the body of the astronauts. One of the biggest dangers of weightlessness is losing muscle and bone mass. Astronauts have to exercise daily to prevent these things from happening because, in space, no ambulance will fly that high after a 911 call. Additionally, exercising doesn’t even solve the problem, and it just slows it down. That is one reason why teams do not spend longer than six months on the ISS, and if they do, they do it at their own risk. To add more, astronauts experience loss of taste, nausea, and redistribution of fluids, affecting their ability to absorb oxygen,
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Publications Project which eventually slows their cardiovascular disease. Their bodies go through a spectacular transformation never seen before. On the other hand, their mental health is affected as well. Realizing that you are outside Earth can and will play with your brain. You learn how insignificant we are in this universe because you see a big blue thing that floats in space. It takes an asteroid to end life on the planet or only a burst of energy from the Sun to render our atmosphere useless. Moreover, they are deprived of their friends and their families for a long time. This deprivation can cause anxiety or depression, which is no small thing for any human being. I believe there is no need to state the medical problems that astronauts face in space. They are extraordinary in their difference and nature from the ones that we face on Earth. That is why the ISS is one of the most fantastic opportunities for medical research in human history.
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The importance of ISS in medicine The experiments conducted onboard the station brought us to scientific discoveries in more domains of medicine. First of all, the scientists on the ISS board created the first robotic technology capable of performing surgery inside MRI machines. Thus, making impossible surgeries possible and making complicated brain tumor surgeries more comfortable to perform. By testing this robot with more precision than a human hand could ever have, we can open a chapter needing the most experienced doctors on the planet to save your life through the past. This robot could be mass-produced and save the lives of thousands of patients. Second of all, the stress of spaceflight causes the herpes virus to appear in body fluids. All of the population on Earth is infected with one of the eight types of this virus, and scientists are developing a small
Health Technologies device that will quickly detect the symptoms of herpes. By doing this, treatment can start earlier and prevent complications. Moreover, the studies conducted on the ISS can help see the triggers that the immunity system has. Thus, by understanding how our defense systems work in space, we can use this information to treat autoimmune diseases and organ transplant rejection on Earth. Other advances have been made in treating patients with stroke, spinal cord injuries, or balance problems by studying the effects of weightlessness on astronauts. The system that collects information on astronauts’ body movements is now used in Rome to treat stroke patients and kids with cerebral palsy. Moreover, studying the eye movement reactions that humans have before and post spaceflight helped better diagnose dizziness, vertigo, or equilibrium disturbances, just by using a method that corrects
their perceptions to train them to suppress all the diseases listed above.
Why should we care about this Having humanity develop to the level it is set right now poses us with some questions. The ISS’ importance is not just on helping medicine on Earth, but also in space. Not so long ago, a billionaire promised to colonize Mars. But how can we colonize another planet when we cannot resist for more than one year 400 km above our world. That is why we need this marvel of engineering, To facilitate the development of medicine and study the effects of leaving the planet on us. Because the dream is to go to the planet one day and explore how our body behaves outside our world will allow us to thrive on other planets successfully.
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Publications Project It’s no secret that there are still many challenges that we are trying to solve in our modern world. From environmental to material sciences, from computational to medical research, there are many smart people hard at work figuring out solutions to our society’s most challenging problems. Among those people are researchers from The University of Sydney Nano Institute. Established in 2016 as the Australian Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology , they set out to conduct research in nanotechnology and how it can be applied to solve challenges in multiple science domains. And they’ve set quite some inspiring challenges, which they called “Sydney Nano Grand Challenges.” These are tackled by several interdisciplinary teams consisting of members from multiple university faculties, which becomes necessary when dealing with problems across various fields. Among those challenges are two, at which we will take a closer look. But before we do, what is nano and nanoscience? To quote Sydney University, “Nanoscience is the study of the structure and function of materials on the scale of nanometers, which is one-billionth of a meter or roughly the size of about ten atoms in a row.” In essence, it’s about tiny things that can do something functional and useful. And with that out of the way, let’s look at the first of the two challenges of interest today.
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Small solutions for big problems Author: Mihajlo Milosavljevic
Publications Project Among those challenges are two, at which we will take a closer look. But before we do, what is nano and nanoscience? To quote Sydney University,
“Nanoscienwhich is one-billionth of a meter or roughly the size
Nanorobotics for Health
A team led by Dr. Shelley Wickham and Dr. Anna Waterhouse is working on something fascinating. Their goal is to develop nanorobots that would enter someone’s body to prevent diseases or provide early intervention. As is cited on their grand challenges page, the healthcare cost in Australia is growing quite fast, outpacing the economic growth. Certain diseases are challenging to diagnose and detect, often requiring expensive and invasive procedures, and at times can’t be seen with the current methods until the disease has progressed significantly. They mention heart disease as one of the biggest killers and the treatment of Australia’s highest healthcare expenditures. To address this issue, they moved away from the “break-fix” model and focused more on prevention, where nanotechnology comes in. The nanorobots would be able to enter the bloodstream and detect heart disease signs in its early stages, giving doctors the ability to treat it before any severe disease symptoms occur. Indeed, the technology they are working on could significantly reduce healthcare costs and help doctors treat patients better. Knowing what is happening earlier is most of the battle.
Unlocking the neural interface There is no shortage of talks about artificial intelligence, neural networks, machine learning, etc. Usually, when we talk about these, we talk about software and algorithms, but there is another way to achieve something
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Health Technologies that behaves intelligently, and that is in hardware. This hardware is made to behave more like a real neural network, like a brain, so there is no need to implement any algorithms to run on this hardware, as it already behaves like a neural network. In contrast, our everyday computers do not intrinsically behave in such a way, so we have to write special software that mimics, often with worse results. We can design this hardware on silicon, like other chips. However, another approach to building brain-like hardware is closer to what happens in biology, and that is with bottom-up self-assembly. Essentially, the material self assembles into a complex structure; we need to put together all the ingredients (kind of like how a bit of water and a bit of cold will naturally assemble into a snowflake, we don’t have to carve out the shape ourselves). One of the people involved in such structures’ research is Professor Zdenka Kunčić, and her research projects focus on neuromorphic nanowire networks. These networks are created with the aforementioned bottom-up assembly techniques. And they do resemble real neural networks composed of neurons and neural synapses, which contributes to their name. And as a part of the “Unlocking the neural interface” challenge, one of the goals of this research is restoring lost brain functionality, as they could be capable of doing the same tasks real neurons do. And one of the first uses of such technology that we could see is utilizing a synthetic neural network chip in a bionic eye for better image reconstruction by the brain, instead of using conventional chips. Using neural network chip is something that Professor of biomedical engineering Gregg Suaning has been working on in collaboration with Prof. Kunčić. The technology looks promising, and with the potential to restore neural functionality, a whole new horizon could open up for neuroscience.
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Head transplants how to solve neuromuscular diseases Author: Gonzalo Sรกenz de Ugarte
Health Technologies
Nowadays, medicine seems to be improving faster every time. Life expectancy continues to grow, diseases once deadly are now completely eradicated or have a cure, and discoveries in the last centuries such as organ transplants or vaccines have helped save countless lives (according to the World Health Organization, vaccines save between 2 and 3 millions people every year). However, this year has made a point; there is still a long way to go and many more improvements to make. Such is the case of degenerative diseases. As their name indicates, these diseases cause different tissues or organs to deteriorate overtime at an unusual pace. Some of them are well known, like Alzheimer’s disease, osteoporosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or cancer, while others are rare. Three different groups can be identified among them: those related to the circulatory system (for example, coronary artery disease), neoplastic conditions (when an abnormal growth of a body tissue happens, like cancer), and, finally, neurodegenerative diseases, which also include neuromuscular diseases. So, how can we, with the knowledge and technology we have at this moment, cure them? The answer is simple: we can’t. Despite some of these diseases having treatments that might help the person recover and fight them, in most cases, the only thing that can be done is palliate the patient’s suffering or delay its development.
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Publications Project But that doesn’t mean these people have to give up, that their case is hopeless, or they must wait for years until some progress is made. Neuromuscular diseases are not always related to the brain despite what the name might induce to believe. For example, ALS develops in both the upper and lower motor neurons. Still, some such as all the spinal muscular atrophies occur only in the lower ones, located in the spinal cord. Others, like neoplastic and circulatory diseases, aren´t related to the brain at all. Then, if the problem is the body, why not change it? If the person were given a new body, free of that disease, there would be no need to cure it. And the way to do this is a head transplant (though, according to the definition of transplant, the proper name should be “body transplant,” but let's not get picky). Take the head of the patient free of this disease, and put it in a healthy body. Of course, this isn't easy in any way. It may seem surprising, but head transplants are nothing new. The first to be ever made took place in 1954 when soviet surgeon Vladímir Démijov successfully took the upper torso of a dog and put it in another’s body. The dog managed to live for a few days before dying due to tissue rejection. In 1970, inspired by Vladímir´s progress, North American Robert J. White and a neurosurgeons team made a head transplant on a monkey, which survived nine days before succumbing to immune rejection. The main problems related to this technique are two. The first one is clear and happens in every transplant: rejection. The body sees the head as a foreign organism and fights it. This tendency to fight can be solved the same way as in other transplants, with immunosuppressive drugs. However, this poses a long term threat since it decreases the body’s ability to fight infections or other virus or bacteria-caused illnesses. The other one doesn’t have a solution yet and poses the biggest obstacle to this practice.
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Health Technologies A head transplant implies severing the spinal cord and re-attaching it to a new one. However, this isn't currently possible since there is no known way of reconstructing axons: the nervous fibers of which the spinal cord´s white matter consists. Being unable to reconstruct means that a person who underwent this kind of surgery would be left tetraplegic, losing motor ability from the neck down. Despite this may not seem a good option at first, for someone diagnosed with a chronic or deadly disease, such as degenerative diseases, living the rest of their lives without being able to move might be a better option than not living at all. In any case, the choice should be made exclusively by the patient with the full knowledge of the consequences of that choice and what it implies. Another issue that arises when speaking of this subject is morality and whether continuing testing and developing this process with living animals is okay. Of course, any type of unjustified cruelty against animals is wrong. Still, when looking at all the lives that could be saved if head transplants were a reality, it puts things in perspective. As with every organ transplant currently practiced and helps save lives, it must be previously tested to improve the technique and the process until it is safe to apply with humans. It cannot be denied that head transplants are a significant step in scientific and medical progress. Even if right now it may not seem a feasible alternative, perhaps in a few years, with the development of 3D printing, headless bodies matching the subject´s genetics can be created to prevent rejection. When axons’ reconstruction becomes possible, neuromuscular diseases will be a thing of the past.
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What are they? Wireless brain sensors are small devices inserted inside the brain to monitor intracranial pressure and temperature within the skull of patients who suffer from severe brain injuries such as epilepsy, dementia, Parkinson’s Disease, stroke, sleep disorders, or even Huntington’s Disease. As we live in the modern technology era, researchers and scientists have collaborated, and significant technological advances have led to brain sensors’ continuous and fast progress.
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Wireless D Brain S
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Dissolvable Sensors
uthor: Andreea Nica
Health Technologies
How did it start? Until 2016, there were developed wireless sensors, but the dimensions and the materials used were not compatible with the human body, so it was necessary to remove them right after the procedure was done. “The devices commonly used today are based on technology from the 1980s. They’re large, unwieldy, and have wires that connect to monitors in the intensive care unit. They give accurate readings, and they help, but there are ways to make them better.” explained co-first author Rory K. J. Murphy, MD, a neurosurgery resident at Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.
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Publications Project In 2016 scientists from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and engineers from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign developed wireless, dissolvable brain sensors capable of complete dissolution into the cerebrospinal fluid when they are no longer needed (after a few weeks). These sensors are made of natural materials that are fully biodegradable.
A bright future Doctor Murphy collaborated in the laboratory of John A. Rogers, Ph.D., a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, with engineers to develop a better type of sensor. This device can transmit accurate temperature and pressure readings, but also other information. “With advanced materials and device designs, we demonstrated that it is possible to create electronic implants that offer high performance and clinically relevant operation in hardware that are completely reabsorbed into the body after the relevant functions are no longer needed,” Rogers said. “This type of bioelectric medicine has great potential in many areas of clinical care.” The main goal is creating a device that could be implanted on the organs in the body to transmit information regarding the health parameters of the organ so the doctors could find out much earlier if there is a need for surgery, preventing more significant complications that could threaten the patient’s life. While stress, anxiety, depression problems are spreading faster and faster worldwide, and brain trauma is becoming more common, this device is a significant step towards our difficulties nowadays. Thousands of lives can now be saved. Today, during a global pandemic, things might seem grey and fade. Still, we shall not forget we live in the modern technology era. The hope of a better tomorrow is now even closer to our reality due to the researchers, doctors, scientists, and engineers’ efforts and hard work.
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“
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. ― Neil de Grasse Tyson
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Publications Project Has it already been a year since we counted down to 2020 and clinked glasses to cheer for the year that we would make it? It does seem strange to think that we have spent almost a year in a pandemic, and honestly, who would’ve thought? 2020 has been a roller coaster of a year. That probably is an understatement. Of all the adjustments that we had to make to cope with the wrath of the coronavirus, be it learning to live in lockdowns or trying our hand at some new hobby after the longest time, the easiest and most welcome one was probably the freedom to stay in pajamas all day. Am I right? As students, the stay at home regulations meant a transition to a less stressful University life for many of us. Of course, we can go on and on about the many things we did miss due to not attending classes. We miss hanging out with friends, meeting new people, not having to socialize through screens, and on and on. But I would like to take a moment to
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Health Technologies reflect on a few things that did work out in our favor after all. The first and the biggest one for me was the no more morning rush. It was practically a religion for me; waking up too late, getting ready in a rush, skipping breakfast, and grabbing a coffee while hurrying through the commute, all of it to reach the class in time. Now all I needed was over 10 minutes to get ready for lectures, for it was just 2 feet away from my bed. Worst case scenario, I put on a hoodie and settled into the chair (admit it, we’ve all done it). Suddenly all the time in the world was mine. And I was free to schedule and plan it to the best of my abilities because honestly, what else was I going to do stuck at home all day? I’m sure most of us can relate to the initial release of pressure when you know the time and energy spent in commuting and staying out has been, though forcefully, cut down.
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Publications Project Better planning of our days becomes an imperative task. When left otherwise, the days and nights merge into one. Keeping up with lectures without the outside distractions and planning out our studies became incredibly important to some of us who earlier never paid attention to such things. Above all, the comfort of our home, even in stressful situations, contributed towards reduced stress. For some of us, access to recorded lectures and additional study material was a bonus. Another bright side to our study-at-home situations was the very many new activities many of us took up. If there is one indicator of how much time just our commutes took up, it is the massive chunk of free time that we found ourselves with once stay at home regulations came into effect. And thus, we started our various creative explorations. Some of us dabbled in art, others in music, many still in new technology projects to intellectually stimulate ourselves. If you think about the last year, you can find at least one activity that you participated in that you had not imagined taking up before the pandemic hit. Or simply because you didn’t have the time before. The flexibility that we got with in-person lectures being suspended allowed us to plan our days more creatively with intervals and breaks to rejuvenate with reduced travel strains and the comfort and ease of being in our home environment. There must be more insights and many different positives that each of us has found due to quarantine regulations. What I am most certain of, though, is that each one of us discovered new potential within ourselves, learned things that we did not know we were academically capable of, and maybe even new tricks and methodologies to take our academics head-on. So while we get ready to bid goodbye to 2020, shall we agree that it was not all bad? Let us go onwards to more explorations!
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