A neonatal thorax phantom for contact-less magnetic induction vitalparameter monitoring

For contact-less monitoring of breathing and heart activity, magnetic induction measurements are applicable. For research and the development process of hardware and algorithms for parameter extraction, test cases are computer simulations, animal trials and, at the end, human trials. However, in the first development processes human trials are not suitable due to ethical reasons. Simliarly, animal trials may not be reasonable for only testing different amplifier approaches or basic testing of new coil configurations. There, computer simulations are the only available benchmarks but not suitable for every problem. In this article, we present a neonatal thorax phantom for emulation of lung and heart activity for magnetic induction systems as a test platform.