Bengaluru sources stated that the California based Marconi Society, which has instituted the award, said on Tuesday that Indian born woman research scholar from the University of Washington won the Paul Baran Young Scholar Award for 2018 for using smart phones to detect life-threatening symptoms. The society said “Nandakumar Rajalakshmi is the winner of this year’s Young Scholar Award for her outstanding research work in detecting life-threatening symptoms using smart phones”.
Meanwhile when inspired by bats, which use sonar to navigate in the dark by sending acoustic signals and using reflections to identify objects, Rajalakshmi, 28, has turned a smart phone into an active sonar system to detect physiological activity like movement or respiration in a human body by a remote device. Accordingly “Rajalakshimi’s system works by transmitting inaudible sound signals from a smart phone’s speaker and tracking their reflections off the human body. The reflections are analyzed by algorithms and signal processing techniques”.
Rajalakshmi told “She wanted to find a way to
detect physiological signals, like pulse and heart rate, which are used for
healthcare applications. When she found that many consumer electronic devices have
speakers and microphones, she decided to study if inaudible signals could help
detect physiological movement”.
