Propagation Losses of UWB Antenna for On-Body to In-Body Signal Propagation

To provide better care to the people, who are living in rural areas and whoever in need of emergency medical care, it becomes essential to develop remote monitoring health care applications. Body Area Networks (BAN) that are formed with wearable or implanted wireless sensor devices will play an important role to achieve the above task. Since the communication in BAN is of short communication distance and higher data rate, the Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radio signals make themselves as the right candidates due to their inherent characteristics. This requires more research in design and development of UWB transceivers, especially for implantable biomedical devices. This paper proposes a UWB antenna design and a numerical channel model to predetermine the path loss characteristics of an on-body to in-body channel in UWB. The proposed model has been developed using ray tracing procedures and includes the antenna polarization and radiation pattern. In addition, the predicted results have been validated by measurements conducted with honey based liquid phantoms.