A hardware platform for performance evaluation of in-body sensors

Body area network is expected to be the next breakthrough invention with great potential due to miniaturization of wireless communication devices. One of the major challenges for design of sensor devices for wireless communications inside human body is the accessibility of the medium for performance evaluation. It is practically impossible to install a development module for a sensor inside the human body and when the sensor designed we need expensive procedure with physician supervisions to examine the performance of the sensors. In this paper, we introduce an interference controllable, repeatable real-time hardware platform for performance evaluation of a typical in-body sensor chipset used in most implant applications (Zarlink ZL70101 ADK operating at 402-405 MHz) utilizing an existing multipath channel emulator (Elektrobit PROPSim™ C8) to analyze the performance of the communication link between a sensor located inside the human body and a body mounted sensor. We show how link quality is analyzed by observing the packet reception rate under three different transmission alternatives.