Abstract
We previously showed that a strong correlation exists between the absorption cross section and the body surface area of a human for 0.3-2GHz far field exposure, and proposed a formula for estimating whole-body-average specific absorption rates (WBA-SARs) in terms of height and weight. In this study, to evaluate variability in the WBA-SARs in infants based on their physique, we derived a new formula including Kaup indices of infants, which are being used to check their growth, and thereby estimated the WBA-SARs in infants with respect to their age from 0 month to three years. As a result, we found that under the same height/weight, the smaller the Kaup indices are, the larger the WBA-SARs become, and that the variability in the WBA-SARs is around 15% at the same age. To validate these findings, using the FDTD method, we simulated the GHz-band WBA-SARs in numerical human models corresponding to infants with age of 0, 1, 3, 6 and 9 months, which were obtained by scaling down the anatomically based Japanese three-year child model developed by NICT (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology). Results show that the FDTD-simulated WBA-SARs are smaller by 20% compared to those estimated for infants having the median height and the Kaup index of 0.5 percentiles, which provide conservative WBA-SARs.
