- Biomedical Optics Express
- Vol. 9,
- Issue 3,
- pp. 1301-1308
- (2018)
- https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.9.001301
Saroj R. Tripathi, Paul Ben Ishai, and Kodo Kawase
Abstract
The applications of terahertz (THz) waves have been increasing rapidly in different fields such as information and communication technology, homeland security and biomedical engineering. However, study on the possible health implications due to various biological effects induced by THz waves is relatively scarce. Previously, it has been reported that the human sweat ducts play a significant role in the interaction of the THz wave with human skin due to its coiled structure. This structure imposes on them the electromagnetic character of a helical antenna. To further understand these phenomena, we investigated the morphological features of human sweat ducts and the dielectric properties of their surrounding medium. Based upon these parameters, we estimated the frequency of the resonance of the human sweat duct in a normal mode of operation and our estimation showed that there is a broad resonance around 228 GHz. This result indicates that careful consideration should be given while designing electronic and photonic devices operating in the sub-terahertz frequency region in order to avoid various effects on human health due to these waves. https://www.osapublishing.org/boe/abstract.cfm?uri=boe-9-3-1301
Excerpts:
We estimated that the sweat duct in normal mode of operation resonates at 228 GHz and we believe that this finding will help to further investigate the various effects caused by high frequency electromagnetic wave in the sub-terahertz frequency band. Moreover, this result shows the important criteria to select high frequency electromagnetic wave for the development of biomedical devices and high-speed wireless communication system since the recent progress shows that the next generation communication systems such as THz wireless communication and body-centric nano-communications are expected to operate in a few hundreds of GHz. For example, research on high-speed THz communication systems is
progressing rapidly utilizing the various frequency windows such as 140 GHz and 240 GHz due to the low atmospheric propagation loss. Besides this, extremely high-power sources of gyrotron operating in few hundreds of GHz are being studied for fusion experiments, where small stray radiation of such high power might become an important health issue for the workers in such environment.
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