AUS alumna wins honors at the 14th European Microwave Week

Mai Ali, an alumna of American University of Sharjah (AUS), has won third prize in the Student Challenge Competition at the 14th European Microwave Week held recently in Manchester, United Kingdom.

Ali teamed up with two students from Stanford University and produced a poster entitled "Safe House." The poster summarizes her research done at AUS under the supervision of Dr. Lutfi Albasha and Dr. Hasan Al-Nashash, faculty members from the AUS Department of Electrical Engineering, along with research from published papers in the European Microwave Conference (EuMC). The team chose the theme, "Technology for Aging Population" and they used it to create their 'safe house' poster comprising a glucose monitoring system, a heart rate monitoring system and a fall detection system.

"This award is a real honor," said Ali. "I hope it will help bring focus to our winning project. Our safe house will allow elderly people to continue living in their homes and still be safe as all these state-of-the-art monitoring systems will be sending continuous signals to their doctors to enable the doctors to monitor their health and safety electronically," said Ali.

Prior to the competition, Ali presented a paper entitled "A Blue Tooth Low Energy Glucose Monitoring System" based on her electrical engineering research at AUS on low-powered wireless subcutaneous transmitter.
"This is an implantable transmitter for measuring glucose which will measure glucose levels and send data to your mobile and your doctor through Bluetooth low energy protocol," said Ali.

After completing her bachelor's degree at the University of Khartoum in Sudan, Ali received a scholarship to come to AUS to pursue her master's degree. In the fall of 2010, she received her Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering degree with distinction from AUS.

"I want to thank everyone at AUS who helped me in so many different ways. I thank the College of Engineering starting from my advisers; Dr. Mohammed El-Tarhuni, Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Dean Yousef Al-Assaf, who supported me and helped to fund my trip to Manchester to attend this conference," said Ali.

European Microwave Week is the premier event in this field in Europe featuring the European Microwave Conference, the European Microwave Integrated Circuits Conference and the European Radar Conference. More than 1,700 delegates attended this year's conference.