Abstract
The purpose of this research was to improve the performance of a wireless body area sensor network, operating on a person in the seated and standing positions. Optimization-focused on both the on-body transmission channel and off-body link performance. The system consists of three nodes. One node (on the user’s head) is fixed, while the positions of the other two (one on the user’s trunk and the other on one leg) with respect to the body (local coordinates) are design variables. The objective function used in the design process is characterized by two components: the first controls the wireless channel for on-body data transmission between the three sensor nodes, while the second controls the off-body transmission between the nodes and a remote transceiver. The optimal design procedure exploits a low-cost Estra, which is an evolutionary strategy optimization algorithm linked with Remcom XFdtd, a full-wave Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) electromagnetic field analysis package. The Pareto-like approach applied in this study searches for a non-dominated solution that gives the best compromise between on-body and off-body performance.
Highlights
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are a lively field of research and development because they promise the long-awaited progress towards the widely-available monitoring of physiological parameters—vital signs—in healthcare, health and safety, military applications, and elsewhere [1]
The standards establish a common framework for the development of WBAN applications, but many issues remain open for research and development, including the use of recognized optimization methods
We found that simulation results obtained for the 2.4 GHz ISM frequency band with the heterogenic NMR Hershey human body model in XFdtd are similar to the results of measurements obtained for a human subject and for the simplified 6-cylinder phantom
Summary
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are a lively field of research and development because they promise the long-awaited progress towards the widely-available monitoring of physiological parameters—vital signs—in healthcare, health and safety, military applications, and elsewhere [1]. Minimizing a multi-objective function, which simultaneously depends on a set of design variables, is a vitally important problem in many fields of engineering It is part of many optimization routines which are used widely to search for possible improvements in already existing engineering designs, often developed by heuristic methods or inaccurate design formulas. Our optimization procedure is currently adapted for two body postures: sitting and standing For this purpose, two simplified models of a human body consisting of a set of cylinders are proposed. Two simplified models of a human body consisting of a set of cylinders are proposed These were generated swiftly and automatically in Remcom XFdtd [18], which is a commercial package implementing full-wave Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) electromagnetic simulator, for each optimization step using the available scripting language. We found that simulation results obtained for the 2.4 GHz ISM frequency band with the heterogenic NMR Hershey human body model in XFdtd are similar to the results of measurements obtained for a human subject and for the simplified 6-cylinder phantom
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