Ultra wideband body-centric networks for localisation and motion capture applications

Localisation and motion tracking using body-worn antennas are emerging as an important research area based on ultra wideband (UWB) technology. Motion tracking itself is motivated by a variety of applications such as training of athletes, patient monitoring in health care domain, localisation of people in home or office environment, and the human body is an integral part of such applications. Hence, it is important to study the effect of human body on UWB localisation and the accuracy achieved while localizing the antennas present on the body. The choice of sensors, such as compact, efficient and low-cost UWB antennas, makes human localisation and activity monitoring a promising new application made possible by advances in UWB technology. In this chapter, UWB three-dimensional (3D) human body localisation is studied using body-worn antennas placed on different locations on the human body through numerical and experimental investigations. Detailed analysis is performed based on the measurement data in terms of propagation phenomenon for each antenna location and how the presence of human body affects ranging and localisation accuracy. The objective of the work is to achieve high-accuracy localisation of the human body using time of arrival positioning techniques and also evaluate the results with the optical motion capture system which is used as a standard reference.