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Top1. Introduction
Human health has always been a prime factor of concern with respect to self-development, societal needs or even the nation. In this regard, medical community have been investing tireless efforts to study, diagnose, enhance and improve human health by incorporating advanced technologies. Technologies used for diagnosing ailments in human bones like X-Ray, CT Scan, DEXA etc. are some of the techniques in this category.
DEXA or bone densitometry, is an improved version of x-ray technology for measuring bone mineral density. Till now, DEXA is the primary technique employed for detecting osteoporosis and has fulfilled its purpose to a reasonable extent. DEXA is generally available in major hospitals and prominent scan centres. Apart from its advantageous performance, some drawbacks like exposure of X-rays, high cost and underestimation of fracture due to small bone size and bone degeneration tend to limit its utility.
In this paper, an attempt has been made to evaluate piezo sensors as an alternative to DEXA for detection of mineral loss in bones, known in medical term as osteoporosis, based on electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) technique. This technique is currently employed for structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil and mechanical engineering structures (SHM) (Bhalla and Soh, 2003;Inman et al., 2001;Lim et al., 2006; Soh et al., 2000). In the bio-medical field, the enhanced approach is addressed as bone electro-mechano gram (BEMG) (Srivastava, 2018; Srivastava et al., 2017;Prakash, 2020). Advantages of the BEMG are: low-cost, easy handling, no fear of x-ray exposure to the humans and diagnosis of disease like osteoporosis. Potential evaluation with respect to DEXA and effective drive point impedance based parametric analysis for measuring the degree of osteoporosis need to be taken up.