Magnetic induction (MI) method has been extensively used in non-destructive testing of materials. In biomedical applications, it attracted lots of attention for the contact-less advantages it provides. Sleep monitoring through detecting conductivity changes in lungs and heart during breathing and cardiac activity is the purpose of our studies. The low conductivity of biological tissues increase the complexity of the design of such systems. One challenge is to separate the effects of magnetic field from the electric field; achieving a pure magnetic contribution is difficult since the received signal is contaminated by the unwanted capacitive coupling. Our hypothesis is that for a periodic vital sign monitoring like breathing and heart activity, part of this secondary coupling could be considered as a desired effect to take the advantage of both contributions. In this paper, the coupling mechanisms existed in our system have been simulated and studied using finite element and Orcad simulations to estimate different contributions we would have in the developed MI system.

Peer Reviewed