Abstract
This article presents an overview of future truly personal communications, ranging from networking inside the human body to the exchange of data with external wireless devices in the surrounding environment. At the nano- and micro-scales, communications can be realized with the aid of molecular mechanisms, Forster resonance energy transfer phenomenon, electromagnetic or ultrasound waves. At a larger scale, in the domain of Body Area Networks, a wide range of communication mechanisms is available, including smart-textiles, inductive- and body-couplings, ultrasounds, optical and wireless radio transmissions, a number of mature technologies existing already. The main goal of this article is to identify the potential mechanisms that can be exploited to provide interfaces in between nano- and micro-scale systems and Body Area Networks. These interfaces have to bridge the existing gap between the two worlds, in order to allow for truly personal communication systems to become a reality. The extraordinary applications of such systems are also discussed, as they are strong drivers of the research in this area.
Highlights
The several successive generations of mobile cellular and wireless communications have been aiming at a single goal: to provide connectivity to people at their own pleasure
C) Control over device positions and mobility - Many of the discussed interfacing techniques require a precise control over the relative positions of the communicating nodes, e.g., Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) networks must be exactly positioned so that their signals are received by channelrhodopsins or ATP molecules should be carefully delivered to initiate BRET
Nano-communications between groups of molecules, cells, or EM-based micro-devices, are one of the hottest research areas in communications in recent years. The progress in this discipline is strenuous, since it requires cooperation between IT and medical experts, but the potential applications are countless, extending from healthcare, such as remote diagnostics, surgery and localized drug delivery, to sports, entertainment and military, while encompassing Human-Internet integration. The latter is a vision of truly personal communications, where the far edges of the communication network are deeply inside people’s bodies, allowing for delivering the signals directly from human nerve cells to the outside network
Summary
The several successive generations of mobile cellular and wireless communications have been aiming at a single goal: to provide connectivity to people at their own pleasure. For truly personal communication systems, one needs to encompass nano-networks [1], to allow for the exchange of information among devices inside the human body, by exploiting mechanisms at the cellular and molecular levels. A brief overview of nano- and BAN communication technologies is provided, and the potential mechanisms that can be used to establish interfaces in between the two are discussed The latter is the main contribution of this article, as interfaces are addressed by taking a perspective different from the typical one, by underlining their crucial role in making these systems work.
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