Sensitivity analysis of human phantom models for accurate in-body path-loss model development

Abstract

Sensitivity analysis plays an important role in a variety of statistical methodologies, design procedures and model selection. For development of in-body wireless communications, it is essential to evaluate the designed system performance prior to conducting any practical procedures. Localization of a capsule endoscope inside the gastrointestinal tract is one of the areas that needs to be precisely addressed in wireless body area networks. A highly accurate location estimation of a capsule endoscope in the range of several millimeters is a challenging task. This is mainly because the Radio-Frequency signals encounter a high loss and a highly dynamic channel propagation environment. Therefore, investigation of an accurate path-loss model is required for the development of localization algorithms. Since practical experiments on the real human body are quite infeasible, various human phantom models have been developed for this purpose. This study provides a detailed sensitivity analysis for two different anatomical human phantom models and shows how much the adjustment of the voxeling and the number of cells in phantom models are crucial to reduce the measurement errors in path loss and improve system performance.