Could Your Cell Phone Help Monitor Your Health?

Bell Labs engineers in New Jersey, led by husband-and-wife team Victor Lubecke and Olga Boric-Lubecke, noticed that some of the microwaves transmitted by a cellphone's antenna bounce back to the phone from the chest, heart and lungs of the person using it. Because those organs are moving, the frequency of the reflected radiation is Doppler shifted by a tiny amount. If the lung is expanding, the radiation bouncing off it is pushed closer together, slightly raising its frequency. A contracting lung lowers the frequency. The variation is tiny: just one hertz in a billion. Consequently, the signal from your cellphone reveals two of your vital signs: your pulse and breathing rate. Better still, you don't even have to answer your phone.
Bell Labs--owned by Lucent Technologies--now plans to modify the mobile phone with a circuit that detects the Doppler shift in the reflected signal picked up by its antenna. The phone then sends this information on to the base station, where further signal processing extracts the user's vital signs.

Eventually Doctors will also use the Bell Labs technology routinely to monitor your heart or breathing--just by phoning your mobile.

Lubecke has been working with James Lin from the University of Illinois in Chicago to test his ideas. For the new system to work, the network we use now will have to be modified -- possibly with a simple software change--to retain and interpret the vital health signals. While the phone must be switched on, you don't have to answer it for the system to work: just making it ring generates enough of a signal to allow the heart and lung data to be piggybacked onto the signal that tells the caller your phone is ringing.

While many experts say this technology faces major challenges. This Bell Labs discovery could soon help you to get remote diagnoses just by phoning your doctor. So, it looks like cellphones may have at least some health benefits in the future.

Stephanie Oakes is a fitness correspondent for Discovery Health Channel, a contributing editor for USA Weekend Magazine and the LA Times, and appears on NBC's 'Today in New York'. She can be reached at soakes@beststuff.com.