Study on a Cylindrical Sensor Network for Intelligent Health Monitoring and Prognosis

In this paper, intelligent body healthcare management based on body-centric wireless communications (BCWCs) is considered, and a wearable sensor network is studied. The interaction between electromagnetic waves and the human body is studied at 5 GHz. With the development of BCWCs, numerous on-body sensors need to be interconnected and transmitting information about human body healthcare. Structures of uniform cylindrical sensor networks for intelligent health monitoring and prognosis are proposed and studied. The reason for choosing a cylindrical sensor network is that the shape of a human torso can be approximated as a cylinder. Different numbers and arrangements of wearable antennas are considered and compared, and the far-field beam pattern is considered an important indicator in the investigation. Finally, a sparse cylindrical antenna array is also proposed, and good directional beam pattern performance is obtained. Electromagnetic simulation is performed mainly by the finite-difference time-domain method. This paper provides guidelines for the arrangement of wearable sensor networks.