Public hardware design for collecting data now online

The hardware design has been used in a number of measurement campaigns to evaluate performance of body-area-networks on and around the human body.

Details of the set-up and the PCB layout are available from the NICTA project page. We expect that as the standardization process moves forward, there will be a need to also standardize the measurement and modeling approaches used. Public hardware and data sets are an important part of this process.

Update on the IEEE Body-Area-Networks standard

The Body-Area-Network standard IEEE 802.15.6 has moved a step closer to completion. The four draft documents have now combined into a single draft standard. This draft will be discussed at the upcoming meeting in May.

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