Numerous antenna design approaches for wearable applications have been investigated in the literature. As onbody wearable communications become more ingrained in our daily activities, the necessity to investigate the impacts of these networks burgeons as a major requirement. In this study, we investigate the human electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure effect from on-body wearable devices at 2.4 GHz and 60 GHz, and compare the results to illustrate how the technology evolution to higher frequencies from wearable communications can impact our health. Our results suggest the average specific absorption rate (SAR) at 60 GHz can exceed the regulatory guidelines within a certain separation distance between a wearable device and the human skin surface. To the best of authors' knowledge, this is the first work that explicitly compares the human EMF exposure at different operating frequencies for on-body wearable communications, which provides a direct roadmap in design of wearable devices to be deployed in the Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT).
While research on communications at frequencies above 6 gigahertz (GHz) has been primarily confined to performance improvement, their potentially harmful impacts on human health are not studied as significantly. Most of the existing studies that paid attention to the health impacts above 6 GHz focused only on the uplink due to closer contact with a transmitter to a human body. In this letter, we present the human electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure in the downlink of Fifth-Generation Wireless Systems (5G). Moreover, we propose a downlink protocol that guarantees the EMF exposure under a threshold while keeping the data rate above the 5G requirements.
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