Body Area Networks (BAN) can provide a wide range of applications including medical support, healthcare monitoring, and consumer electronics with increased convenience or comfort. To harmonize with the strong demands from both medical and healthcare societies, and information and communications technology (ICT) industries, IEEE 802.15.6 task group (TG6) was set up to develop an IEEE wireless standard on BAN. This paper presents a general guidance to TG6. Some pre-works to set up TG6 are reviewed. The objectives, main topics, current status are described in details.

Body Area Network (BAN) is considered as a promising technology in supporting medical and healthcare services by combining with various biological sensors. In this paper, we look at wearable BAN, which provides communication links among sensors on body surface. In order to design a BAN that manages biological information with high efficiency and high reliability, the propagation characteristics of BAN must be thoroughly investigated. As a preliminary effort, we measured the propagation characteristics of BAN at frequency bands of 400 MHz, 600 MHz, 900 MHz and 2400 MHz respectively. Channel models for wearable BAN based on the measurement were derived. Our results show that the channel model can be described by using a path loss model for all frequency bands investigated.