A Survey on Intrabody Communications for Body Area Network Applications

Abstract

The rapid increase in healthcare demand has seen novel developments in health monitoring technologies, such as the body area networks (BAN) paradigm. BAN technology envisions a network of continuously operating sensors, which measure critical physical and physiological parameters e.g., mobility, heart rate, and glucose levels. Wireless connectivity in BAN technology is key to its success as it grants portability and flexibility to the user. While radio frequency (RF) wireless technology has been successfully deployed in most BAN implementations, they consume a lot of battery power, are susceptible to electromagnetic interference and have security issues. Intrabody communication (IBC) is an alternative wireless communication technology which uses the human body as the signal propagation medium. IBC has characteristics that could naturally address the issues with RF for BAN technology. This survey examines the on-going research in this area and highlights IBC core fundamentals, current mathematical models of the human body, IBC transceiver designs, and the remaining research challenges to be addressed. IBC has exciting prospects for making BAN technologies more practical in the future.

Human Body as Antenna and Its Effect on Human Body Communications

“…In the literature, two approaches of HBC are widely discussed [2]. In the first approach, the transmitter uses two electrodes, which are attached to the body, to differentially couple modulated current into the body, resulting in a gradient of electric potential around it.…”

Effect of transformer symmetry on intrabody communication channel measurements using grounded instruments

“…Intrabody communication (IBC), also known as human body communication (HBC), is a wireless communication technique in which the human body becomes an integral part of the communication channel, [1,2]. Transmitter and receiver IBC units are placed directly on the skin or in its close proximity, and their maximal distance is the subject's height.…”

A Review on Human Body Communication: Signal Propagation Model, Communication Performance, and Experimental Issues

“…From the experimental investigation, it was found that the large scale body behavior, such walking, sitting, and standing, has little effect on the channel [54,55]. The joint behavior, such as joint flexion or extension, can cause gain variate in 2∼5 dB [56,57], while phase is little affected [57]. The channel characteristics' analysis is shown in Table 3.…”

“…The promising solution to enable the continuous physiological data monitoring is to deploy the body area network (BAN) [6,7], where tiny-size sensors and actuators are utilized to monitor the physiological data and provide the therapeutic functions (i.e., administrate the insulin dosage, control the rates of cardiac pacemaker, etc.) [6,8,9].…”