Public data set for radio modeling around the human body released

We have just released our first dataset, of real radio measurements on a human subject, whilst they undertook everyday activities. The details include office work, driving home, cooking and watching television. 

The dataset is available from the HPI project website

Eric Topol: The wireless future of medicine

Eric Topol says we'll soon use our smartphones to monitor our vital signs and chronic conditions. At TEDMED, he highlights several of the most important wireless devices in medicine's future -- all helping to keep more of us out of hospital beds.

Much of the new data is likely to be streamed via wireless networks to and from smart phones, from small sensors in and around the human body. See the TED talk for more info.

Tech Predictions for 2010 from The Australian

As part of the tech report for 2010, The Australian newspaper asked a select team of CTO's and CEO's what their major predictions for 2010 were.

Some highlights:

• David Skellern NICTA: Fuel-efficient cars and the appliance of science in sport will be the focus this year.
• Malcolm Thatcher, Mater Health Services: There is great potential for health IT to transform healthcare delivery, E-health can be a big enabler of healthcare efficiencies and transformation of quality and safety -- getting a bigger bang for the buck.
• Tracey Fellows Microsoft Australia: Government investment in broadband is putting technology on the agenda, where it hasn't been, at that level, for a long time. That's creating a bigger buzz about the industry all up, which is good for all of us.

Bumblebee - a new micropower Body-Area-Network?

From the University of Washington: 

A team from Professor Brian Otis' Wireless Sensing Lab has been named a winner at the 2010 Design Automation Conference (DAC)/International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Design Competition. Their entry, titled "The Bumblebee: A 0.3 gram, 560uW, 0.1cm3 Wireless Biosignal Interface with 10-m Range", was authored by Tim Morrison, Helen Zhang, Shailesh Rai, Jagdish Pandey, Jeremy Holleman, and Brian Otis.

More info from the University of Washington's website

Australian Communications Theory Workshop

We'll be presenting several posters at the Australian Communications Theory Workshop in Canberra over the next few days -- Wed to Fri. If you're at the Australian National University, then feel free to drop by and visit.

In particular, we've got work on (links are to those posters that have associated papers):

• Channel characterisation and prediction (wed)
• Sparsity enhancing windows (thurs)
• Body Area Networks: Lessons learnt (thurs)
• Body Area Network transmission power control (fri)

You can find more publications here

Welcomes and farewells

The last few weeks have seen a quite a lot of staff movement within the HPI group. We said farewell to the six summer scholars, who handed in their final reports Friday, 29-Jan. Farewell also to Dr. Jian (Andrew) Zhang - who has taken up a tenure track position at the CSIRO lab in Marsfield Sydney.

We welcome two new staff to the machine learning track of HPI: Mr. William Han, research programmer and Dr. Hanna Suominen, post-doctoral researcher, both join the algorithm development team.

Sleeping detrimental to Body-Area-Networks

After several nights' work, we now have a detailed modelling of the impact of sleeping on the links of a body area network.

The initial results are in Further sleeping measurements for BAN

300+ hours of sleeping BAN channel measurements with characterisation of data in terms of outages with respect to receiver sensitivity. Showing that channel outages are greater than 10% with -100 dBm receiver sensitivity. A new appendix was added to document that responds to some concerns about the measurements that were raised at the November 2009 meeting. These measurements validate the measurements presented in November.