Impacts of RF Radiation on the Human Body in a Passive Wireless Healthcare Environment

In this paper, we identify the most significant problems involving the impacts of radio frequency (RF) radiation on the human body. The coming pervasive healthcare environment will rely heavily upon wirelessly communicating devices to provide the information visibility and communication capabilities required to achieve these ambitious systems. The impact of significant and continuous RF radiation exposure must be understood to ensure that we first do no harm with our new environments. The Specific Absorption Rates (SAR) is a dosimetric measure that has been widely adopted as a method for quantifying radiation absorbed by the human body. This tool is both simple and useful. We investigate the factors that affect RF absorption in human tissues to identify the physical and biological factors that impact RF absorption. Similarly, we investigate the factors that influence biological responses to the effects of absorbed and incident RF radiation. We focus specifically on low power and passive communicating systems that will form the vast majority of the wireless devices in a pervasive healthcare environment.