Abstract

Body channel communication (BCC) is a technique for data transmission exploiting the human body as communication channel. Even though it was pioneered about 25 years ago, the identification of a good electrical model behind its functioning is still an open research question. The proposed distributed model can then serve as a supporting tool for the design, allowing to enhance the performances of any BCC system. A novel finite periodic transmission line model was developed to describe the human body as transmission medium. According to this model, for the first time, the parasitic capacitance between the transmitter and the receiver is assumed to depend on their distance. The parameters related to the body and electrodes are acquired experimentally by fitting the bio-impedentiometric measurements, in the range of frequencies from 1 kHz to 1 MHz, obtaining a mean absolute error lower than 4° and 30Ω for the phase angle and impedance modulus, respectively. The proposed mathematical framework has been successfully validated by describing a ground-referred and low-complexity system called Live Wire, suitable as supporting tool for visually impaired people, and finding good agreement between the measured and the calculated data, marking a ±3% error for communication distances ranging from 20 to 150 cm. In this work we introduced a new circuital approach, for capacitive-coupling systems, based on finite periodic transmission line, capable to describe and model BCC systems allowing to optimize the performances of similar systems.

Highlights

  • The expressions intra-body communication, human body communication and Body channel communication (BCC) all refer to a short-range communication method that exploits the human body as a transmission medium for electrical signals [1], [2]

  • As result from the total error rate (TER) values, the number of correct packets over the total number of packet sent, decreases as the number of people increases. All these findings underline that it is possible to establish the communication using the body as transmission medium, and the case-use device Live Wire is capable of that, but still exist some critical cases which may hamper the use of BCC in practice

  • This work dealt with the problem of the development and validation of a transmission line model for BCC

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Summary

A Periodic Transmission Line Model for Body Channel Communication

MATTEO BRUNO LODI 1, (Graduate Student Member, IEEE), NICOLA CURRELI2, ALESSANDRO FANTI 1, (Member, IEEE), CLAUDIA CUCCU3, DANILO PANI1, (Senior Member, IEEE), ALESSANDRO SANGINARIO 3, (Member, IEEE), ANDREA SPANU1, (Member, IEEE), PAOLO MOTTO ROS 4, (Member, IEEE), MARCO CREPALDI 4, (Member, IEEE), DANILO DEMARCHI 3, (Senior Member, IEEE), AND GIUSEPPE MAZZARELLA 1, (Senior Member, IEEE).

INTRODUCTION
PROPAGATION MODEL
CHANNEL ANALYSIS
CIRCUITAL REPRESENTATION
CHANNEL CHARACTERIZATION AND TRANSMISSION MEASUREMENTS
RESULTS
CONCLUSION
Full Text
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