Morphological Study on Human Body Absorption Cross Section in a Reverberation Chamber From 1 GHz to 16 GHz

The human body absorption cross section (ACS) is important in nonionizing radiation dosimetry, but it is always hard to accurately evaluate the ACS of an individual from his or her morphological parameters, such as height and weight. To obtain an empirical formula that can evaluate the ACS from morphological parameters, 48 subjects with different morphological parameters were measured from 1 to 16 GHz in a reverberation chamber. The ACS was extracted from the power delay profile. This has the advantage of not requiring antenna radiation efficiency, and it has not been previously used in a wideband group study like this. The accuracy of the ACS measurement is demonstrated by comparison with the ACS of a spherical model with known structure and material, and the mean absolute percentage error of the sphere measurement is just 3.4%. Statistical analysis shows that the body surface area (BSA) has the strongest correlation with the ACS among all the morphological parameters; therefore, we present a new empirical ACS formula as a function of BSA and frequency. This will be of interest to those considering dosimetry, and in computing the effect of human body absorption on radio propagation in vehicles and other structures.