UWB Channel Modeling for Wireless Body Area Networks in Medical Applications

Wireless body area networks (WBAN) are expected to be a breakthrough technology in healthcare areas such as hospital and home care, telemedicine, and physical rehabilitation. Because the human body has a complex shape consisting of different tissues it is expected that the nature of the propagation of electromagnetic signals in the case of WBAN to be very different than the one found in other environments, e.g. offices, streets, etc. There have been several previous experimental studies aimed to characterize the nature of the UltraWideband (UWB) channel for the case of WBANs. In this paper we describe our contribution to expand the knowledge of the UWB channel by taking measurements in the frequency range of 3-11 GHz in realistic scenarios expected to be found in medical applications. We also present channel models that have been developed using the experimental results.