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Intra-body communication is a wireless means of exchanging information within a personal area network (PAN) between wearable electronic sensors and devices. The feasibility of intra-body communication is confirmed through several experiments on signal propagation within the human body, and a human phantom is designed and used to obtain reproducible results over repeated experiments. Based on the results of these experiments, a prototype transmission system is constructed using aluminum electrodes powered by 3 V DC and operating in the 10.7 MHz frequency modulation (FM) band. This prototype is demonstrated to be capable of transmitting analog signals through the human subjects in the presence of external noise. Digital data transmission at 9600 bps is also achieved using newly fabricated 10.7 MHz frequency shift keying (FSK) transmitter and receiver devices. The carrier frequency of 10.7 MHz is the intermediate frequency of FM radio receivers, meaning that the proposed system can make use of a wide selection of inexpensive, commercial radio frequency devices.

Recently, wearable devices which use the human body as a transmission channel have been developed. However, there has been a lack of information related the transmission mechanism of such devices in the physical layer. Electromagnetic communication trials using human body as transmission media have more than a decade's history. However, most of the researches have been conducted by researchers who just want to utilize the fact and practically no physical mechanisms have been researched until recently. Hence, in previous study, the authors proposed calculation models of the wearable transmitter and the receiver attached to the arm using the FDTD method. Moreover, the authors compared the calculated received signal levels to the measured ones by using a biological tissue-equivalent phantom. However, there was little analysis on each component of the propagated signal. In this paper, the authors clarified the transmission mechanism of the wearable device using the human body as a transmission channel from the view point of the interaction between electromagnetic wave and the human body. First, the authors focused their attention on measuring the each component of the propagated signal using a shielded loop antenna. From these results, the favorable direction of electrodes of the transmitter was proposed to use the human body as a transmission channel. As a result, longitudinal direction is effective for sending the signal to the receiver, compared to the transversal direction. Next, the authors investigated the dominant signal transmission channel, because the question of whether the dominant signal channel is in or around the arm had remained unsettled. To clear this question, the authors proposed the calculation model of an arm wearing the transmitter and receiver placed into a hole of a conductor plate. The electric field distribution and received signal voltage was investigated as a function of the gap between the hole of the conductor plate and the surface of the arm. The result indicated that the dominant signal transmission channel is not inside but the surface of the arm because signal seems to be distributed as a surface wave.

IR spectroscopic conformational analyses of Boc–Glyn–OBzl (n=3–7) and Boc–(β-Ala)n–OBzl (n=3–8) were performed in the solid state, suggesting the occurrence of the β-sheet structure in the higher oligomers (n=5–8). Solubility data indicate that insolubilities of Boc–Glyn–OBzl and Boc–(β-Ala)n–OBzl in high-polar solvents begin at hexa- and heptapeptide levels, respectively. Insolubility of protected homooligopeptides of Gly and β-Ala was estimated to be caused by β-sheet aggregation. The high potential for the β-sheet formation of Boc–Glyn–OBzl and Boc–(β-Ala)n–OBzl (n≥5) could clearly be attributed to the great freedom of the peptide backbone dihedral angles of each of the Gly and β-Ala residues in the β-sheet structure. The implications of a replacement of a few Gly residues with β-Ala residues in surface regions of proteins are also discussed.