Development of an Android application for user exposure assessment to electromagnetic fields emitted by an IEEE 802.11ax client

We offer a preliminary description and evaluation of an Android application that can be used to characterize user exposure to electromagnetic fields emitted by an 802.11ax mobile device. The system used consists of a DUT (Device Under Test - Huawei P40 Pro) connected to a wireless router. A measurement system composed of a small isotropic antenna connected to a spectrum analyzer and remotely controlled via a custom designed Python application was used to measure the field strength. Higher field levels were observed during file upload as compared to file download. Based on the measurements recorded by the Android application we performed an analysis of the field changes according to the number of transmitted/received bits and RSSI. We observed direct field strength variation with upload/download speed. We have also introduced the dosimetric indicator of power density/unit of information and proved its validity in highlighting different usage profiles. Further investigations have to be carried out in order to provide large scale data on Wi-Fi user exposure in the case of realistic operating scenarios.