Abstract
Human body communication (HBC) has recently emerged as an alternative method to connect devices on and around the human body utilizing the electrical conductivity properties of the human body. HBC can be utilized to enable new interaction modalities between computing devices by enhancing the natural interaction of touch. It also provides the inherent benefit of security and energy-efficiency compared to a traditional wireless communication, such as Bluetooth, making it an attractive alternative. However, most state-of-the-art HBC demonstrations show communication between a wearable and an Earth ground–connected device, and there have been very few implementations of HBC systems demonstrating communication between two wearable devices. Also, most of the HBC implementations suffer from the problem of signal leakage out of the body which enables communication even without direct contact with the body. In this article, we present BodyWire which uses an electro-quasistatic HBC (EQS-HBC) technique to enable communication between two wearable devices and also confine the signal to a very close proximity to the body. We characterize the human body channel loss under different environment (office desk, laboratory, and outdoors), posture, and body location conditions to ascertain the effect of each of these on the overall channel loss. The measurement results show that the channel loss varies within a range of 15dB across all different posture, environmental conditions, and body location variation, illustrating the dynamic range of the signal available at the input of any receiver. Leakage measurements are also carried out from the devices to show the distance over which the signal is available away from the body to illustrate the security aspect of HBC and show its effect on the channel loss measurements. For the first time, a through-body interhuman channel loss characterization is presented. Finally, a demonstration of secure interhuman information exchange between two battery-operated wearable devices is shown through the BodyWire prototype, which shows the smallest form factor HBC demonstration according to the authors’ best knowledge.
Highlights
Improvements in the solid-state circuit design over the last several decades have enabled the widespread proliferation of wearable devices and personal computing resources to a diverse number of users
The Results section contains Intra-body and Through-Body Inter-Human Body Communication (TBI-Human body communication (HBC)) Measurements followed by a demonstration of the smallest ever form-factor electro-quasistatic HBC (EQS-HBC) device
HBC has been a field of active research over the last 2 decades since it was proposed by Zimmerman (1996) for personal area networks (PANs)
Summary
Improvements in the solid-state circuit design over the last several decades have enabled the widespread proliferation of wearable devices and personal computing resources to a diverse number of users Many daily functions such as financial transactions, SMS, health monitoring, and telecommunication have either been off-loaded to these devices or assessed as necessary features to carry everywhere. EQS-HBC enables communication through the conductive properties of the human body and uses the body as a wire while limiting the physical signal leakage out of the body by operating at the electroquasistatic (lower frequency) regime This enhances the security of ubiquitous wearables by eliminating the access of the physical signal from a nearby malicious attacker. The Results section contains Intra-body and Through-Body Inter-Human Body Communication (TBI-HBC) Measurements followed by a demonstration of the smallest ever form-factor EQS-HBC device
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