In-body ranging with ultra-wideband signals: Techniques and modeling of the ranging error

Abstract

Results about the problem of accurate ranging within the human body using ultra-wideband signals are shown. The ability to accurately measure the range between a sensor implanted in the human body and an external receiver can make a number of new medical applications such as better wireless capsule endoscopy, next-generation microrobotic surgery systems, and targeted drug delivery systems possible. The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we propose two novel range estimators: one based on an implementation of the so-called CLEAN algorithm for estimating channel profiles and another based on neural networks. Second, we develop models to describe the statistics of the ranging error for both types of estimators. Such models are important for the design and performance analysis of localization systems. It is shown that the ranging error in both cases follows a heavy tail distribution known as the Generalized Extreme Value distribution. Our results also indicate that the estimator based on neural networks outperforms the CLEAN-based estimator, providing ranging errors better than or equal to 3.23mmwith 90% probability.