Antennas and propagation for body centric wireless communications

Body-centric wireless communications refer to human-self and human-to-human networking with the use of wearable and implantable wireless sensors. It is a subject area combining wireless body-area networks (WBANs), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). Body-centric wireless communications has abundant applications in personal healthcare, smart home, personal entertainment and identification systems, space exploration and military. The human body is an uninviting and often hostile environment for a wireless signal. In general, antennas suffer from reduced efficiency due to electromagnetic absorption in human tissues, radiation pattern fragmentation and variations in impedance at the feed. Typical geometries of wireless wearable and implantable devices, vary from millimetric to centimetric sizes and, hence, compact yet efficient antennas need to be fully characterized and integrated with the RF transceiver. As well as size there are other significant challenges in the design of antennas for body-centric wireless communications. The objective of this talk is to highlight current and emerging research in antennas and propagation for body-centric wireless communications, as well as applications of this technology.