Towards a Covered and Connected Body Sensor Network for Healthcare Applications

摘要

Radio transmitters of an implanted sensor circuitry during their operation dissipate energy which results in rise in temperature of its surroundings. The human body can tolerate such increase in temperature only up to a certain threshold value beyond which serious injury may result. To prevent this sensors must be implanted in a way that ensures the surrounding area temperature to remain within the threshold. Using a thermal model for heat distribution from multiple heat sources (radio transmitters), we observed that if the implanted sensor nodes are placed sufficiently apart from each other, then the temperature of the surrounding area does not exceed the threshold. This minimum separation distance constraint gives rise to a new variation of the sensor network connected coverage problem that has not been studied earlier.