For medical workers, ultrasound phantoms for human soft tissue are used not only for accuracy management of ultrasound diagnosis but also to aid ultrasound-guided needle and blind catheter insertion training without risk to real patients. For the phantoms, ultrasound characteristics and a texture are required to mimic the human soft tissue. The proposed phantom was composed of sodium alginate, calcium sulfate dihydrate, trisodium phosphate 12-hydrate, glycerol, and water. The propagation speed, attenuation coefficient, acoustic impedance, and texture of the proposed phantom were almost the same as those of human soft tissue. Expensive chemicals and special equipment are not required.

This paper proposes a scheme to obtain location and vital health information using ZigBee system. ZigBee systems are wireless communication systems defined by IEEE 802.154. In the proposed scheme, location information is obtained using the Link Quality Indication (LQI) function of a ZigBee system, which represents the received signal strength. And, the vital health information are collected from the electrocardiogram monitor, the pulse and blood pressure device, attached to the patient's body. This information is then transmitted to an outside network by ZigBee systems. In this way, vital health information can be transmitted as ZigBee sensor data while patients with the ZigBee terminal are moving. In the experiments using actual ZigBee devices, the proposed scheme could obtain accurate location and vital health information from the sensor data. Moreover, to achieve high reliability in the actual service, the collected amount of sensor data was confirmed by the theoretic calculation, when a ZigBee terminal passed through ZigBee routers. These results indicate that the proposed scheme can be used to detect the accurate location of the ZigBee terminal. And over 99% of the sensor data on vital health information was obtained when the ZigBee terminal passed through approximately four ZigBee routers.

In this paper, we propose multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transmission using human bodies. The proposed scheme is experimentally evaluated using test subjects, whose bodies are located at different positions. A high channel capacity was achieved by using MIMO transmission. The channel capacity obtained for 2 × 2 MIMO in body-to-body communication is approximately 1.6 times higher than that obtained when using single-input single-output transmission. The experimental results indicate the success of the proposed method in increasing channel capacity using MIMO. The presented research is relatively unique, and the results would therefore be a valuable contribution to this field of research. , vol. 35, no. 3-4, pp. 609-617, 1996. DOI:10.1147/sj.353. 0609 [2] M. Sasaki and K. Ochiai, "Prsonal and demonstration of intrabody communication with a sensitive electro-opotic sensor," IEEE Trans.