Ultra Wideband for in and on-body medical implants: A study of the limits and new opportunities

Since the release of spectrum by FCC in 2002 the UWB standard has undergone some significant changes, the most important being the elimination of full bandwidth (FBW) peak power constraint. Under new regulation, while the concept of average power (-41.25 dBm/MHz) remains the same, the new regulation adds the notion of a peak power density (PPD) limitation. In our recent work, we proposed a new model to compute the in-body path loss for standards lying beyond the 2.4GHz band and thereby demonstrated the feasibility of UWB for biomedical implants. In this paper we extend that work and show that in light of the aforementioned revision of UWB standard, we can leverage the PPD provision to enable longer ranges for low data rate applications such as most in- and on-body medical-implants.