A Study on Intrabody Communication for Personal Healthcare Monitoring System

Abstract

In this paper we propose the use of intrabody communication (IBC) for a personal health monitoring system employing inexpensive, lightweight, miniature sensor platforms. Body area networks (BANs) with physiological sensors could improve current healthcare services and at the same time significantly reduce costs to public health systems. We are primarily looking to reduce the transmission power consumption of the wireless communication links by using very low power IBC to connect the BAN sensors, a change that has also been shown to increase the durability of the sensors. There has been no specific study carried out to date on the optimal modulation scheme for such IBC. For this reason, we investigated the transmission characteristics of the human body as a conductor of signal up to 2.4 GHz by considering different transmitter power consumption and data transmission rates. We believe that an optimal modulation scheme for IBC would allow an increase of the data transmission bit rate in our personal health monitoring system model. Therefore, we evaluated the performance of two different modulation schemes, QPSK and BPSK. Our experiment is conducted with point-to-point communication between an electrocardiogram sensor located in the chest region and a central hub located on the left wrist.

Past Results, Present Trends, and Future Challenges in Intrabody Communication

“…Other authors have studied the influence of electrode-skin contact. According to [141], the contact impedance between the electrode and the body is independent of the type of metal (aluminium, copper, bronze, brass, stainless steel, nickel silver, and silver/silver chloride (Ag/AgCl)). The results of Callejón et al [29] comparing different types of electrodes (pregelled Ag/AgCl, aluminium, and copper) confirmed that the electrode material does not bear too much influence on IBC performance whenever a conductor is used.…”

“…Alshehab et al [141] investigated the optimal configuration by considering inclusion and exclusion of a ground electrode touching the skin, different sizes of electrodes, ground circuit board, and the distance between the signal electrode and the circuit board. They concluded that the best configuration, in terms of the lowest path loss, was composed of only signal electrode touching the skin (round copper plate with 2-cm of diameter) and a 10-cm × 5-cm ground circuit board at a distance of 1.5-cm from the signal electrode.…”

“…Copper has been used as the electrode material in many studies because of its good conductivity [141]: 25-mm × 25-mm [153], 3-cm × 3-cm [132], 2-cm × 2-cm [20,40,152,154,155], 6-cm × 8-cm [156], or circular with a radius of 10-mm [36]. Stainless-steel electrodes of 5-mm × 15-mm was employed in [157].…”

Intra-Body Hybrid Communication Scheme for Healthcare Systems

“…The main problem in the design of a mobile health care system is the unit's power supply trying to accommodate the rapidly increasing performance of processors, memory and other components [1]. The lower power requirements of intra-body communication (IBC) as compared to near field electromagnetic waves, implies that it can be a suitable solution for Medical Body Area Networks (MBANs) in a mobile health care system [1].…”

“…Intra-body communication (IBC) in which the human body is used as a medium for signal transmission guide has attracted much attention in the study of Body Area Networks (BANs), because signals pass through the human body, electromagnetic noise and interference have little influence on transmissions [1] [2] [3].…”