Current projects
Hands, Heads and Phone Radiation
Supervisor(s): Dr Chinthana Panagamuwa
Study into the effect of real human hands on energy absorbed inside a phantom head when using mobile phones
Radiation limits in the body from mobile phones are based on the study and measurement of the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR), the rate at which energy is absorbed by a unit mass. All current SAR measurement standards for mobile phones exclude the hand from the experimental setup. This is based on the belief that by excluding the hand a conservative SAR value is realised in the measurement. During formulation of the initial SAR measurement standards, this conclusion was drawn from a select few studies. Since then, a number of researchers have suggested that the hand can increase the SAR in the head, thus casting doubt on these long held conclusions. The research proposed here aims to investigate in detail the effect of real hands on SAR inside a head phantom, and through detailed analysis establish if current SAR measurement standards are still conservative.
Measurements using a number of mobile phones and a large number of participants will be carried out using a SPEAG iSAR2 head and a MT8820A Radio Communications Analyser, acting as a base station simulator, to trigger the mobile phone into transmitting at maximum permissible power. Participants will be asked to hold a number of different mobile phones with a number of different grip styles against the iSAR2 head. A number of participant’s hand parameters, hand size, hand volume, grip style, palm permittivity and conductivity etc, will be recorded in addition to the SAR measurements. It is hoped that the procedure will be repeated with a large number of participants to form a large dataset. Conclusions will then be drawn on whether the hand can increase the SAR inside the phantom and what proportion of the mobile phone using population this is likely to affect.