Subject:  Cellphone signals can monitor body activity (Philips).
Date:     Mon, 12 Feb 2001 110824 -0600
From:     Roy Beavers 
To:       guru 
--------------------------------------------------

.......From EMF-L.......

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Cellphone signals can monitor health
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 11:13:13
From: Alasdair Philips 
To: Roy Beavers 

Roy,
Given your recent mailings about the effect on endogenous 
living body fields, what about this?? What is it they say, 
that microwaves don't effect us??
Yes, sure thing!
Alasdair
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mobile monitor
Cellphone signals can monitor the state of your health 

Exclusive from New Scientist magazine 1900 GMT, 7 February 2001

Nicola Jones

The signal from your cellphone reveals your pulse and breathing 
rate, according to a remarkable discovery at Bell Labs 
in New Jersey. 

This occurs even without you answering your phone, meaning 
survivors of earthquakes and other disasters could be 
identified. 

The Bell Labs engineers, 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.

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. 
"We're talking about very low-frequency signals. They're easy 
to separate from a voice," says Lubecke.

To pick up the reflected signals, the cellphone has to be 
held steady for a few seconds, says Lubecke. Which is just 
what will happen if its owner is trapped or unconscious. 
Doctors could 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. The researchers used a 
radio with similar frequency and power to a typical mobile 
phone to demonstrate the effect in their lab. Now they are 
building a prototype detector. 


Interference pattern 

Today's cellphone networks treat the interference information 
as unwanted noise and discard it. For the new system to work, 
the network will have to be modified to retain and interpret 
the signals, says Lubecke. This could be as simple as a 
software change.

The phone must be switched on, but 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. 

Lubecke says chest movement is easiest to detect, along with 
heart rate.  Later, he hopes to be able to tease out 
information about the strength of heartbeats, too. 

Other experts say the technology faces major challenges. Alan 
Preece, who investigates mobile phone health effects at the 
University of Bristol, says that the heartbeat signal would be 
so much weaker than the main signal that it risks being swamped. 

Correspondence about this story should be directed to:
 
news@newscientist.com


Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com