Abstract
This paper presents a robust simplex Body Channel Communication (BCC) system aimed at providing an interactive infrastructure solution for visually impaired people. Compared to existing BCC solutions, it provides high versatility, wearability and installability in an environment in a low complexity hardware-software solution. It operates with a ground referred–transmitter (TX) and it is based on an asynchronous threshold receiver (RX) architecture. Synchronization, demodulation and packetizing and threshold control are completely software defined and implemented using MicroPython. The RX includes Bluetooth® (BT) radio connectivity and a cell-phone application provides push text-to-speech notifications to a smartphone. The hardware achieves a Packet Error Rate (PER) of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula> 0.1 at 550 kHz pulse center frequency, Synchronized-On Off Keying (S-OOK) modulation and 1 kbps data rate, for an average current consumption of 44 mA.
Highlights
Communication (BCC) system aimed at providing an interactive infrastructure solution for visually impaired people
The original and main application idea behind Body Channel Communication (BCC) is to enable the private information exchange among wearable nodes placed on the human body, optionally connected to another portable concentrator operating as a gateway for the cloud or simple internet infrastructure connections [1]–[3]
Thanks to BCC, space can be interactively explored as a person must touch the surrounding objects to gather information
Summary
Body Channel Communication (BCC) can be interpreted as the exchanging of information through a movable, living and self-contained transmission medium, that is, the human body. Live Wire requires just a microcontroller I/O pin to drive the TX signal and a low-complexity front-end detector at the RX based on very limited number of external active components. It is fully implemented using MicroPython (μPy), an open source and extensible high-level programming language, increasingly used in real-time system development (see [19] and research in [20]) and considered as an interesting alternative to empower embedded systems [21]. Our contribution regards i) an innovative application to increase quality of life of visually impaired people, ii) an HW/SW architecture for landmarks exploration in smart environments, iii) an associated threshold control algorithm, iv) a working prototype including an experimental validation of the system. VI presents detailed performance measurement results and functional validation obtained by installing the TX in different furniture, grounded though an USB port, and concludes with a state-of-the art comparison
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
