A wireless personal sensor node for the Dosimetry of Interventional Radiology operators

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an important technology for large-scale monitoring, providing sensor measurements at high temporal and spatial resolution. In healthcare applications, a variety of system prototypes and commercial products have been designed and manufactured with the aim to provide an alternative and more efficient method for real time patient monitoring. In the framework of the Real time Active PIxel Dosimetry (RAPID) project, the attention has been focused on dose monitoring of Interventional Radiology operators. In this work, we present a study on the RF interface with the optimization of the antenna design to obtain a compact solution making the system portable. The effect of human body influence on the performance of the antenna has been simulated: a distance of 1.5 cm from the body shows that the artificial body structure has a negligible detuning effect on the antenna performances. The Packet Error Rate (PER) of the network has been evaluated considering different values of Transmitter Output Power (TPO) and comparing the performance of two different antennas: the maximum obtained PER was lower than 0.2%, which is acceptable for the specific application.