Microwave hyperthermia (MWHT) enhances cancer treatment effectiveness by heating tumor tissues to a temperature range of 40–44°C. This, among other effects, inhibits DNA repair, increases local blood perfusion and oxygenation and makes cancer cells more sensitive to chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The temperature increase is usually achieved by constructive interference of several electromagnetic waves propagating from a phased antenna array surrounding the patient. This work explores the development and validation of a metamaterial (MTM) antenna, a single antenna element for the phased antenna array, based on composite right/left-handed (CRLH) transmission lines, which enables a more flexible antenna size in relation to wavelength and offers benefits such as larger effective field size (EFS) and improved uniformity of specific absorption rate (SAR) distribution. MTM antennas can achieve zeroth-order resonance (ZOR), which can be used to surpass conventional waveguide antennas by delivering more uniform heating profiles and better effective penetration depth (EPD). We have successfully developed and confirmed by measurements the functionality of a novel 70 MHz MTM antenna with an EFS value of 75%. Sensitivity analyses and experimental validations confirm that MTM antennas can be designed to arbitrary frequency with a desired SAR pattern regardless of their geometrical dimensions. As a result, MTM antennas hold the potential to improve hyperthermia outcomes by providing a more controllable, efficient, and patient-tailored approach, ultimately contributing to more effective oncological treatments.

Falls in older adults are a leading cause of injury, and the time spent on the floor afterwards is the stronger predictor of outcome. We present a low-cost system that detects the sustained lying posture following a fall. An FLIR Lepton 3.1R (160 × 120 px) and an int8-quantized FOMO detector run fully on an OpenMV RT1062 board; no image data leaves the node. Ten healthy adults, none in the training data, followed a structured posture protocol, yielding 3034 labelled frames. No fall, real or simulated, was recorded: lying is a proxy for a post-fall state, and claims are restricted accordingly. The detector produced an output on only 66.3% of labelled frames, with a strong class dependence (75.6% lying, 51.7% standing). End-to-end, binary lying-posture recognition reached a sensitivity of 0.723 (95% CI 0.637–0.812) and an F1 of 0.801. Every sustained lying bout of at least 20 s was flagged, but the deployed alert rule also produced roughly one hundred false alerts per hour of non-lying activity. Low-resolution thermal sensing is therefore a workable basis for long-lie detection; the limiting factors are the detector’s class-dependent miss rate and the alert logic, not the posture classifier.