UWB Body Area Network to Medical Vital Sensing in hospital, homes

We investigated advantages and drawbacks of wireless BAN (Body Area network) sy~tems using UWB(Ultra Wide Band) wireless technology that are expected robustness against inteJference, low power consumption, and little inte1ference to a body for healthcare. Two types of low and high frequency bands for ·uws were examined .using various vital sensors for hospital and home bedside monitoring. The high band UWB BAN system with TDMA protocol in MAC worked well to prevent inteJference. The most important drawbacks was shadowing problem when changing the position of body on the bed. We confirmed by experiments that shadowing can be prevented by selecting proper antenna and setting a coordinator near the ceiling and another coordinator under the bed. We also examined the combined high band prototype of UWB-BAN with WINDS satellite communication link to perform real transmission of C/WB-BAN vital data and DICOM CT slice image, assuming the case of disaster ~-Yhen the land communication i~ damaged. No packet loss was experienced during two hours. Round trip time from KASHIMA to YRP (Yokosuka) was 61 Omsec with processing delay that is al~owable for vital data.