The frequency response of an implantable antenna is key to the performance of a wireless implantable sensor. If the antenna detunes significantly, there are substantial power losses resulting in loss of accuracy. One reason for detuning is because of a change in the surrounding environment of an antenna. The pulsating anatomy of the human heart constitutes such a changing environment, so detuning is expected but this has not been quantified dynamically before. Four miniature implantable antennas are presented (two different geometries) along with which are placed within the heart of living swine the dynamic reflection coefficients. These antennas are designed to operate in the short range devices frequency band (863–870 MHz) and are compatible with a deeply implanted cardiovascular pressure sensor. The measurements recorded over 27 seconds capture the effects of the beating heart on the frequency tuning of the implantable antennas. When looked at in the time domain, these effects are clearly physiological and a combination of numerical study and posthumous autopsy proves this to be the case, while retrospective simulation confirms this hypothesis. The impact of pulsating anatomy on antenna design and the need for wideband implantable antennas is highlighted.

Deformational plagiocephaly (DP) manifests in a deformed skull primarily caused by retaining a constant sleeping position in infants. Manual measures of skull asymmetry based on MRI or CT scans combined with the cranial vault asymmetry index (CVAI) provides information on the extent of asymmetry. CVAI uses four points on the skull as markers for the asymmetry index but tends to underestimate the deformity because of the lack of sampling points. Computer-based continuous-point methods may be a more objective measure with better sensitivity for the skull contour. The outline of the skull circumference of infants with confirmed cranial deformity was obtained from the literature and analysed applying the mean bending energy (MBE) obtained from the Hermitian wavelet. MBE was shown to correlate with CVAI in the current sample and has the potential to add both quantitative and visual information in 2D or 3D space for the clinician to diagnose DP. Wavelet-based continuous-point estimation of skull asymmetry is a useful method as it is more sensitive to mild deformation anywhere along the skull outline and in assessing slow but progressive improvement as a result of treatment. The broader significance is that this method can be applied to other structural pathology analysis in clinical practice.

A method to characterise upper-limb tremor using inverse dynamics modelling in combination with cross-correlation analyses is presented. A 15 degree-of-freedom inverse dynamics model is used to estimate the joint torques required to produce the measured limb motion, given a set of estimated inertial properties for the body segments. The magnitudes of the estimated torques are useful when assessing patients or evaluating possible intervention methods. The cross-correlation of the estimated joint torques is proposed to gain insight into how tremor in one limb segment interacts with tremor in another. The method is demonstrated using data from a single patient presenting intention tremor because of multiple sclerosis. It is shown that the inertial properties of the body segments can be estimated with sufficient accuracy using only the patient's height and weight as a priori knowledge, which ensures the method's practicality and transferability to clinical use. By providing a more detailed, objective characterisation of patient-specific tremor properties, the method is expected to improve the selection, design and assessment of treatment options on an individual basis.

The ‘E-servant’, a programmable system to control and manage assistive technologies, telehealth and telecare devices in a home environment is presented. The E-servant is programmed using a simple graphical interface that allows the user to build a dialogue in the form of a production rule system, which is triggered by a patient- or technology-initiated event. The patient interacts with the system through a personalised user interface to reach their goal of completing a task. These tasks, which the authors call ‘scenarios’, can be designed for users of different abilities (cognitive and/or physical). They can also be given priority levels, for example if a potential emergency situation arises in the patient's home, a scenario associated with the sensing of this event takes highest priority. The research presented in this Letter outlines the E-servant, its programming tool and reports its evaluation in living laboratory settings. The results suggest that it can be used as a central management system for supporting an integrated support environment for facilitating healthcare and activities of daily living, especially for older patients.

The potential of the new weighted-compressive sensing approach for efficient reconstruction of electrocardiograph (ECG) signals is investigated. This is motivated by the observation that ECG signals are hugely sparse in the frequency domain and the sparsity changes slowly over time. The underlying idea of this approach is to extract an estimated probability model for the signal of interest, and then use this model to guide the reconstruction process. The authors show that the weighted-compressive sensing approach is able to achieve reconstruction performance comparable with the current state-of-the-art discrete wavelet transform-based method, but with substantially less computational cost to enable it to be considered for use in the next generation of miniaturised wearable ECG monitoring devices.

E-medicine is a process to provide health care services to people using the Internet or any networking technology. In this Letter, a new idea is proposed to model the physical structure of the e-medicine system to better provide offline health care services. Smart cards are used to authenticate the user singly. A very unique technique is also suggested to verify the card owner's identity and to embed secret data to the card while providing patients' reports either at booths or at the e-medicine server system. The simulation results of card authentication and embedding procedure justify the proposed implementation.