Antennas and propagation for body centric communications

Body centric wireless communication is now accepted as an important part of 4th generation (and beyond) mobile communications systems, taking the form of human to human networking incorporating wearable sensors and communications. There are also a number of body centric communication systems for specialized occupations, such as paramedics and fire-fighters, military personnel and medical sensing and support. To support these developments there is considerable ongoing research into antennas and propagation for body centric communications systems, and this paper will summarise some of it, including the characterisation of the channel on the body, the optimisation of antennas for these channels, and communications to medical implants where advanced antenna design and characterisation and modelling of the internal body channel are important research needs. In all of these areas both measurement and simulation pose very different and challenging issues to be faced by the researcher.