Property in body parts and products of the human body

An intriguing question, which until recently had not been directly explored by the courts, is the extent to which English law recognises body parts and products of the human body as property capable of ownership. Although the common law currently recognises no general property in a dead body (and only limited possessory rights in respect of it), this apparent “no-property rule” provides no justification, it is submitted, for denying proprietary status to parts or products of a living human body. The recent decision of the Court of Appeal in Yearworth v. North Bristol NHS Trust ([2009] EWCA Civ 37) lends strong support to the view that genetic material (as the product of a living human body) is capable of ownership, at least in the context of a claim in the tort of negligence and bailment. This article examines the various issues by reference to both English and Commonwealth authority.

Cooperative communications in ultra-wideband wireless body area networks: Channel modeling and system diversity analysis

In this paper, we explore the application of cooperative communications in ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless body area networks (BANs), where a group of on-body devices may collaborate together to communicate with other groups of on-body equipment. Firstly, time-domain UWB channel measurements are presented to characterize the body-centric multipath channel and to facilitate the diversity analysis in a cooperative BAN (CoBAN). We focus on the system deployment scenario when the human subject is in the sitting posture. Important channel parameters such as the pathloss, power variation, power delay profile (PDP), and effective received power (ERP) crosscorrelation are investigated and statistically analyzed. Provided with the model preliminaries, a detailed analysis on the diversity level in a CoBAN is provided. Specifically, an intuitive measure is proposed to quantify the diversity gains in a single-hop cooperative network, which is defined as the number of independent multipaths that can be averaged over to detect symbols. As this measure provides the largest number of redundant copies of transmitted information through the body-centric channel, it can be used as a benchmark to access the performance bound of various diversity-based cooperative schemes in futuristic body sensor systems.