The digitization of hospitals offers the great opportunity to relieve the overburdened nursing staff of documentation work and manual device settings. This leaves more time for the most important task of the nurses, caring for the patients. The Possehl engineering award winner Micha Studer dealt with exactly this in his bachelor thesis.
“An important topic in the field of digitization in hospitals is, for example, the networking of ventilators, patient monitors and incubators with each other,” says Studer. In this context, wireless connections through antennas are increasingly being used, as these connections offer a high degree of flexibility for the medical staff. “This is where the problem arises: when antennas are installed in ventilators, the electrical properties of the antenna change. For example, the device shields the antenna. As a result, the information can no longer get from the device to the recipient,” explains Studer.
In his bachelor thesis in the course Electrical Engineering – Communication Systems Micha Studer dealt with the question of whether these changes in the electrical properties of the antenna can be predicted with a computer simulation. The student created a 3D model of a ventilator with a built-in antenna and simulated how it emits from the device. For comparison, he made measurements with the real ventilator and it turned out that his predictions were correct with just a few deviations. “This method could be used to advance the networking of devices in hospitals,” says Micha Studer.