Abstract
Intra-body communication (IBC) is a novel key research area that will foster personalized medicine by allowing in situ and real time monitoring in daily life. In this work, the energy efficient galvanic coupling (GC) technology is used to send data through intra-body links. A novel sound card-based GC testbed is designed and implemented, whose main features are: (i) low equipment requirements since it only employs two ordinary PCs with sound card support and Matlab software, (ii) high flexibility since all the parameters setting may be easily modified through the PC control panel and Matlab programs, (iii) real time physiological data transmissions, and (iv) almost error free communication by developing specific physical (PHY) layer techniques, which are implemented and tested with a real chicken tissue in the experimental evaluation. A signal to noise ratio (SNR) calculation is also proposed with the twofold purpose to be used for frequency offset compensation and as metric to evaluate the proposed architecture. The developed GC testbed may be easily replicated by the interested research community to carry out simulation-based experiments, thus fostering new research in this field. Moreover, the Matlab source code of the proposed GC transceiver is freely available online on Code Ocean.
Highlights
Implanted sensors will transform the generation of healthcare by in situ testing of physiological conditions, proactive drug delivery and personalized medicine
We propose a signal to noise ratio (SNR) calculation with the twofold purpose to be used for frequency offset compensation and as measure alternative to bit error rate (BER), since the proposed architecture achieves almost error free performance; and define a specific electromyography (EMG) application, where signals sensed from a healthy muscle are transmitted to a close one that is not able to receive input signals due to a nerve compression
WORKS After a brief description of the techniques alternative to radio frequency (RF), we detail the galvanic coupling (GC) technology used in the paper and its State of the Art (SoA), mainly focusing on the developed channel models that are at the basis of the research work in GC communication, and the existing GC testbeds to underline the differences with the proposed one
Summary
Implanted sensors will transform the generation of healthcare by in situ testing of physiological conditions, proactive drug delivery and personalized medicine. Specific physical (PHY) layer techniques from modulation schemes to frequency, phase and time recovery are implemented in the transmitter/receiver (tx/rx) Matlab programs and a real time option for the receiver may be carried out through a Data Acquisition Toolbox (Daq Tbx) in Matlab that exploits the real time data logging characteristic of the toolbox [10]. In this way it is possible to realize real time transmission and evaluation of physiological data sets. We share online on Code Ocean the source code of the developed GC transceiver for the interested research community
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