Ultra WideBand Industry

The commercial Ultra WideBand (UWB) market is in its infancy. Only recently has the FCC allowed UWB-based products to be manufactured and sold in the United States (February 14, 2002). The rest of the world is awaiting the recommendation of the study being conducted by the International Telecommunications Union before approving UWB for use in their countries. In the Unites States, UWB-based products may only be sold for indoor operation, hand-held outdoor operation, vehicular radar (collision avoidance) use, and to law enforcement, fire, and rescue organizations for selected material penetrating imaging applications (Ground Penetrating Radar and Wall Penetrating Imaging Systems).

The UWB Products

The Real-Time Precision Location and Tracking system will be designed to service markets where there is a need to determine the location of people or valuable assets in real-time. The initial users of these types of systems will be hospitals and care centers where they will use the system to track their patients, personnel, and mobile life saving equipment. Other market segments that may also wish to use this system include large corporations wishing to track their mobile assets or personnel; moving and storage companies, warehouses, and distribution centers tracking customer or product crates (inventory) within their facilities.

In order for these companies to justify using an UWB location and tracking system, the UWB system must be comparable or better than existing systems in terms of features, cost, and/or functionality. A typical UWB location and tracking system will consist of hundreds or thousands of low-cost mobile transmitters that send beacon signals with their unique ID and other short information (one-way) to stationary or hand-held receivers. The receivers use the difference in the time of arrival of the beacon signal to calculate the exact location of the tag. Because the UWB signals

Wireless 2000 will be using are pulse based, whereas other technologies use narrow-band (sinusoidal) signals, the Wireless 2000 system will be able to resolve the location of a tag to within 5-10 centimeters, whereas other technologies can only resolve a location down to 3 meters. UWB systems also have advantages in terms of immunity to frequency selective fading which affects narrow-band technologies and can cause tags to become undetected in indoor environments.

The Heart Rate and Respiration Monitor will be designed for use as a non-contact heart and respiration rate monitor. The non-contact nature of the device will allow it to be placed on the outside of clothing or beneath the bed of a patient in a hospital or care facility. Since this device is non-contact and does not require leads connected to the body, it will allow the patient greater freedom of movement. This device could also be used in instances where the patient's skin is very sensitive such as with burn victims or prematurely born infants. Another potential market for the HRRM is the health and fitness market.

Key selling points will be the fact that the UWB system can measure both heart rate and respiration rate, can be worn on the outside of clothing, and is not prone to interference from other nearby monitors. Existing heart rate monitors used by fitness enthusiasts can only record heart rate, must be strapped to the chest (i.e. have contact with skin), and use the same transmit and receive channels increasing the probability of interference between users. Is has been shown that heart rate together with respiration rate provide a better indication of exertion level than just heart rate alone.

The HRRM will consist of an extremely low power radar transmitter (1/1000th the power of a cell phone), which sends short pulses of energy toward the lung and heart, a receiver which collects the signal reflections off the lung and heart, signal processing to eliminate the noise and extract the heart rate and the respiration rate from the received reflected signals, and either a display, in the case of a consumer application, or a data communication module, in the case of a hospital or care center application, to send the data to a central monitoring station.

Commercial production of the HRRM System is expected to commence this year.