Synopsis

There is great interest in using emerging wireless technologies to support remote patient monitoring in an unobtrusive, reliable and cost effective manner thereby providing personalized sustainable services to patients. Medical Body Area Networks (MBANs) is one such emerging technology that has the potential to significantly improve health care delivery, diagnostic monitoring, disease-tracking and related medical procedures. MBANs need to provide highly reliable and low power communications for medical devices, especially those implanted in the human body. In this talk, I will introduce our research into MBANS that covers interference mitigation and coordination, channel modeling, and experimental platforms development in the MICS. Effective radio interference mitigation is crucial to achieving highly reliable and low power operation for implant communications. Interference can be caused by legacy systems that operate in the same frequency bands or by other MBANs operating at the same frequency and in the same location. Radio interference issues must be therefore well understood and interference mitigation algorithms and techniques must be effectively supported by emerging protocols. Our research in this area includes investigation of interference mitigation methods based on game theoretic approaches and truthful interference coordination while considering the selfishness of each user. An experimental platform for in-body applications in the 400 MHz MICS band has also been developed and used for channel measurements and modelings.

Dr Gengfa Fang Received the Master in Wireless Communications from Zhejiang University in 2002 and PhD degree in computer science from the Institute of Computing Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2007. From Oct. 2007 to May 2009, he worked as a Researcher at the Canberra Research Lab of National ICT Australia (NICTA) on Wideband Code Division Multiple Access Femtocell and Medical Body Area Networks. In 2009, he joined the Department of Electronic Engineering Macquarie University, where he is now a Lecturer. From Jun. 2010 to Dec 2010, he was working on Rural Broadband Access project at CSIRO as a Research Scientist. He has published over 30 papers on embedded network systems, MAC protocols, cross-layer design, wireless resource management and allocation for WiMAX, LTE and MBAN. His research has been supported by PicoChip, NXP, CSIRO and Zarlink.

The Department of Engineering at Macquarie University carries out research activities focusing on wireless technologies including device modeling, antennas and communications and networking. The Department hosts around 40 PhD students working in these areas and has extensive research collaboration with universities and industry around the world. The Wireless Communications and Networking Laboratory (http://engineering.mq.edu.au/research/groups/wireless) conducts research into radio resource management in next generation broadband wireless networks (focusing on cognitive radio networks) and in medical wireless body area networks.