Radiation of electromagnetic waves from various sources including cellphone has become a raising public concern. This has motivated us to study the scattering and absorption of EM waves on a human head based on the coupled hp finite/infinite element (FE/IE) method.The electromagnetic power deposition and transfer properties of a G1 continuous head model reconstructed from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)data are investigated. The discretization error is controlled by a self-adaptive process driven by an explicit a posteriori error estimate. Based on the benchmark problem of reproducing the Mie series solution, the scattering of a plane wave on the curvilinear head model is used to evaluate the hp FE/IE approach and calibrate the error bound. The radiation pattern from a short dipole antenna modeling a cell phone, is analyzed in terms of the level and distribution of the specific absorption rates (SAR). The numerical experiments show that the hybrid hp FE/IE implementation is a competitive tool for accurate assessment of human electromagnetic exposure.