Impact of Hub Location on the Performance of Wireless Body Area Networks for Fitness Applications

This letter compares the propagation properties of wireless body area networks for three different locations (head, foot, and waist) of the hub/Internet gateway on the human body. The wireless channels between the hubs and four nodes (chest, back, and upper arms) are measured for frequencies between 5 and 7 GHz on a female and a male subject performing push-ups and squats. A framework using path gain and fade depth metrics in spider plots is used for cumulative performance description. The results show that the best overall performance is for a hub located on the temple, and the worst overall performance is achieved for a hub on the waist. These results are expected to stimulate further research into the optimum hub placement on the human body.