Noninvasive Wireless Body Area Networks

The principle research goal of the project is the design, optimization and demonstration of a noninvasive wireless body area network (BAN) with unprecedented energy efficiency, unobtrusiveness, scalability and cost structure.

A BAN connects independent nodes (e.g. sensors) dispersed in the clothing. It is an indispensable element of Wearable Computing and has rich applications in home/health care, sports, defense, ambient intelligence, pervasive computing and many other areas. Major characteristics/challenges of our design are:

• an extremely low transmit power per node (noninvasive) to minimize interference and cope with health concerns. The targeted transmit power is below the spurious emission level of electronic equipment like personal computers and portable CD players. This is key for the user acceptance of a wireless network so close to the body.

• an efficient support of a high density of heterogeneous nodes (about 50 per body) with data rates ranging from several hundred to several million bits per second.

• an optimal network energy efficiency (node autonomy). We target an energy consumption which is an order of magnitude below the current state of the art.

Some immediate consequences of these requirements are:

(i) the use of a broadband signaling scheme (possibly Ultra Wideband),
(ii) frequency range below 6 GHz and
(iii) the support of heterogeneous multihop links to cope with the high path loss through the human body.

These requirements are extremely hard to satisfy and are not met by known wireless network technologies and wireless BAN designs.