Wearable Wireless Body Area Network Research Articles

Design of a Miniaturized High-Isolation Diversity Antenna for Wearable WBAN Applications

This paper proposes a miniaturized high-isolation diversity antenna for wearable wireless body area network (WBAN) applications. An inverted-F type radiating element is used to reduce the overall dimension of the proposed antenna to <TEX>$30mm{\times}30mm{\times}2.5mm$</TEX>. The antenna performance on the human body phantom is analyzed through simulation and the performance of the fabricated antenna is verified by comparing the measured data with that of the simulation when the antenna is placed on a semi-solid flat phantom with equivalent electrical properties of a human body. The fabricated antenna has a 10 dB return loss bandwidth over the Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) band from 2.35 GHz to 2.71 GHz and isolation is higher than 28 dB at 2.45 GHz. The measured peak gain of antenna elements # 1 and # 2 is -0.43 dBi and -0.54 dBi, respectively. Performance parameters are analyzed, including envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), mean effective gain (MEG), and the MEG ratio. In addition, the specific absorption ratio (SAR) distributions of the proposed antenna are measured for consideration in use.

An Evaluation Method of Research on Wearable Wireless Body Area Network in Healthcare

An Evaluation Method of Research on Wearable Wireless Body Area Network in Healthcare

Channel Modelling for WBANs

Development of an appropriate propagation channel model is an important step to design wireless body area network (WBAN). Because the human body has different body shapes (male, female and child), different tissues with different permittivity and conductivity (even the same person at the different age), and limbs positions and postures are changing all the time, this made the in-body channel modelling extremely difficult, if not impossible. There are few publications on implant communication channel models compared to wearable WBAN. In this paper, we present a literature survey on radio channel modelling for WBAN, especially the IEEE 802.15.6 models. The performance of the model is studied by simulating probability density functions (PDF) and cumulative distribution functions (CDF). Finally, we briefly outline some aspects of our future research works.