Towards Wireless Impedance Tomography Systems

T A York, D Belabdi, A Burnett-Thompson, D Emiroglu, O Egbetola, L McCulloch, S Savvides and W Q Yang

Department of Electrical Engineering & Electronics, UMIST PO Box 88, Manchester, M60 1QD, UK, tay@umist.ac.uk

ABSTRACT

This paper presents design considerations for implementing wireless electrical tomography systems. A variety of standard technologies are considered, including Bluetooth, Wireless LAN, Home RF and HiperLAN. For a number of reasons, including cost, availability, complexity and capability, none of these is, currently, ideal for the task. Wireless LAN presents, perhaps, the most promising approach for the future. As an alternative, RF modules are readily available as naked devices that, when supervised by a dedicated microcontroller, can support an appropriate communication protocol. An apparent limitation of modest individual data rates can be overcome by operating multiple transceiver pairs in parallel. A wireless tomography system architecture is proposed based on RF modules. The proposed system is not entirely “wireless”, requiring a small number of physical interconnections to distribute power and synchronise measurements.

Keywords Electrical Impedance Tomography, Industrial Application, Wireless, USB interface