A Low-Cost Electronic System for Human-Body Communication

Abstract

Human-body communication (HBC) has increasingly gained attention from academia and industry. Most current works focus on characterizing the use of human-body tissues as a physical medium to enable reliable communication. However, designing coupling hardware and communication circuits for reliable data transmission (e.g., high throughput and low latency) is a demanding task, especially for achieving a compact full electronic implementation. For this purpose, there are few commercial devices, mainly differential probes and balun transformers, employed with electrical analysis instruments such as oscilloscopes and vector network analyzers. Although these devices are widely used, they are expensive and are difficult to miniaturize and integrate into real-world HBC-specific applications (e.g., data security). This article presents a low-cost electronic system that transfers collected data using a secondary channel: the ionic environment (the primary channel would be the wireless environment). We design an electronic system as an experimental setup for studying HBC, allowing the communication between instruments, sensors, and actuators by human-body tissues. The experimental evaluation of the proposed system follows (i) a phantom composed of saline (0.9%) and (ii) a real human forearm through adhesive surface electrodes.

LORENA: Low memORy symmEtric-Key geNerAtion Method for Based on Group Cryptography Protocol Applied to the Internet of Healthcare Things

“…The hardware responsible for signal coupling and reception consists of a Differential Drive and a Sensing Amplifier, which have a description open to the community [46]. Briefly, the Differential Driver converts the microcontroller's electronic pulses into electrical current, representing the modulated signals and the relationship between them and the physical environment (human body).…”

“…This work does not specify which technology or standard will be applied at IoHT, and communication technologies such as ZigBee, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, [33]. Even communication through the body itself (galvanic or capacitive) [34]. However, there are some premises on which the protocol is based on IoHT communication.…”

“…First, LORENA evaluates the generation of the individual secret key considering security performance and efficiency. Thus, the performance evaluation testbed uses off-the-shelf and low-cost hardware components to couple out electrical signals in the body [11]. A saline solution reproduces human tissue ionic characteristics in the testbed set up to propagate the signal, thus exchanging data between the communicating devices.…”

Transmission Analysis in Human Body Communication for Head-Mounted Wearable Devices

“…Although many HBC systems have been proposed [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35], the devices were mainly worn on arms and trunks. To widen the range of applications, we previously investigated the basic transmission mechanism of HBC between head-mounted wearable devices [36].…”

Human Body Communication with Head-Mounted Wearable Devices

“…Although many HBC systems have been proposed [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35], the devices were mainly worn on arms and trunks. To widen the range of applications, we previously investigated the basic transmission mechanism of HBC between head-mounted wearable devices [36].…”