Evolving Intelligent Reflector Surface Toward 6G for Public Health: Application in Airborne Virus Detection

While metasurface-based intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) are an important emerging technology for future generations of wireless connectivity in its own right, plans for the mass deployment of these surfaces motivate the question of their integration with other new and emerging technologies that would require such widespread deployment. This question of integration and the vision of future communication systems as an invaluable component for public health motivated our new concept of Intelligent Reflector-Viral Detectors (IR-VD). In this novel scheme, we propose deployment of intelligent reflectors with strips of receptor-based viral detectors placed between the reflective surface tiles. Our proposed approach encodes information of the presence of the virus by flicking the angle of the reflected beams, using time variations between the beam deviations to represent the messages. This information includes the presence of the virus, its location and load size. The article presents simulations to demonstrate the encoding process that represents the number of virus particles that have bound to the IR-VD.