Human Body Communication Transceiver Research Articles

Deep learning-based Human Body Communication baseband transceiver for WBAN IEEE 802.15.6

Recently, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has revolutionized e-health-care. WBAN boosts monitoring vital signs utilizing tiny wireless sensors implanted in or around the human body. In February 2012, the IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN standard was released for low-power and short-range communication around the human body. The standard defines one medium access control layer and three different physical layers: narrow band , ultra-wideband, and Human Body Communication (HBC) layers. We are motivated by exploiting the human body as a communication medium. We propose a novel optimized architecture for the HBC baseband transceiver based on deep learning. The receiver utilizes two deep neural networks: one for frame synchronization to recover data and timing precisely and the other for the channel decoder to improve transceiver performance and reduce power consumption. In addition, low-complexity Preamble/SFD generator, Walsh modulation, and FSC spreader modules are proposed to reduce the power consumption while preserving the transceiver performance. Compared with the traditional hard-decision channel decoder, the proposed neural network decoder improves the block error rate by 2 dB. The proposed HBC transceiver supports 1.312 Mbps data rate at 42 MHz clock rate. The transceiver is implemented in RTL and synthesized on 90 nm CMOS technology. It consumes 493 pJ/bit on the receiver side and 105 pJ/bit on the transmitter side.

Design and performance analysis of human body communication digital transceiver for wireless body area network applications

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a prominent technology for resolving health-care concerns and providing high-speed continuous monitoring and real-time help. Human body communication (HBC) is an IEEE 802.15.6 physical layer standard for short-range communications that is not reliant on radio frequency (RF). Most WBAN applications can benefit from the HBC's low-latency and low-power architectural features. In this manuscript, an efficient digital HBC transceiver (TR) hardware architecture is designed as per IEEE 802.15.6 standard to overcome the drawbacks of the RF-wireless communication standards like signal leakage, on body antenna and power consumption. The design is created using a frequency selective digital transmission scheme for transmitter and receiver modules. The design resources are analyzed using different field programmable gate array (FPGA) families. The HBC TR utilizes <1% slices, consumes 101 mW power, and provides a throughput of 24.31 Mbps on Artix-7 FPGA with a latency of 10.5 clock cycles. In addition, the less than 10-4bit error rate of HBC is achieved with a 9.52 Mbps data rate. The proposed work is compared with existing architectures with significant improvement in performance parameters like chip area, power, and data rate.

A GMSK/PAM4 Multichannel Magnetic Human Body Communication Transceiver

This letter presents a dual-mode multichannel transceiver implemented with low path loss offered by magnetic human body communication (mHBC) toward ultraefficient body-area networking. Two spectral-efficient modulation schemes: 1) Gaussian minimum-shift keying (GMSK) and 2) 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4), are used to reduce interference on adjacent channels. A power oscillator is used to efficiently generate both GMSK- and PAM4-modulated magnetic fields while multichannel selection is implemented by on-chip capacitor tuning and an analog PLL, enabling 5 and 10 Mb/s data for GMSK and PAM4, respectively. The transmitter achieves an efficiency of 15.5 and 19.4 pJ/bit, while the receiver consumes 4.6 and 2.7 pJ/bit for GMSK and PAM4, respectively.

An efficient hardware-based human body communication transceiver architecture for WBAN applications

The wireless body area network (WBANs) technology is a promising technology for Continuous Health care monitoring and real-time support at high speed. Human body communication (HBC) is one of the non-Radio frequencies (RF) overcomes the drawbacks of RF-based wireless standards is as per IEEE 802.15.6 physical layer standards. In this Article, an area and power-optimized HBC digital transceiver hardware architecture are designed for WBAN applications. The proposed HBC Digital Transceiver is designed per IEEE 802.15.6 Physical layer (PHY) standards using the Frequency selection digital transmission (FSDT) method. The Walsh coding mechanism with Frequency shift codes (FSC) is used for frequency spreading and despreading generation in HBC Transmitter and receivers. The HBC Digital transceiver is designed and implemented on Artrix-7 FPGA. The design utilizes < 2 % chip area and works at 255.31 MHz operating frequency on Artix-7 FPGA. The HBC transceiver works with a data rate of 9.52 Mbps by consuming 101 mW of power for 100 MHz carrier frequency. In addition, the HBC transceiver obtains the Bit error rate (BER) ratio of 10-4 by transmitting 10188 bits. The proposed HBC transceiver is compared with exiting IEEE 802.15.6 PHY standards and similar Existing HBC architectures with better performance improvements.

A Sub-10-pJ/bit 5-Mb/s Magnetic Human Body Communication Transceiver

This article presents a transceiver designed to exploit the low path loss offered by magnetic human body communication (mHBC) toward ultra-efficient body area networking. A single-stage power oscillator is used to efficiently generate on–off-keying (OOK) modulated magnetic fields via body-worn coils that act as both resonant and magnetic-field-generating elements. To de-couple improved path loss yet reduced data-rate tradeoffs with increasing $Q$ of coils, a synchronous injection-locked kick-start circuit is proposed, enabling 5-Mb/s data at a carrier frequency of 40 MHz with $Q$ of ~50 and also providing dynamic frequency tuning to compensate normal inductor variation during motion. The receiver (RX) exploits the low path loss toward the design of a low-power sub-threshold-biased dynamic-threshold amplifier and envelope detector and successfully performs non-coherent demodulation of received OOK data. The transmitter and RX consume 18.56 and 6.3 $\mu \text{W}$ , which when including a 17.2- $\mu \text{W}$ crystal oscillator for the reference clock, results in an efficiency of 7.15 and 4.7 pJ/bit, respectively, when closing a link across the body.

BodyWire: A 6.3-pJ/b 30-Mb/s −30-dB SIR-Tolerant Broadband Interference-Robust Human Body Communication Transceiver Using Time Domain Interference Rejection

Human body communication (HBC) utilizes the human body as the communication medium between devices in and around the body, providing an energy-efficient, secure alternative to radio wave communication traditionally used in body area networks (BAN). However, the human antenna effect results in the human body picking up environmental interference affecting HBC transmissions. Most state-of-the-art HBC transceivers utilize narrowband modulation techniques to communicate using frequencies, which are not affected by interference. In this article, we use capacitive termination and voltage mode communication techniques to utilize the human body as a broadband (BB) communication channel enabling as a BB HBC. An integrating dual data rate (I-DDR) receiver utilizing time-domain interference rejection (TD-IR) through integration and periodic sampling is used for interference-robust BB HBC operation. The proposed receiver can achieve higher energy efficiency as it utilizes the full bandwidth of the body for data transmission and does not require any modulation/demodulation. The BB HBC transceiver is fabricated in the TSMC 65-nm technology. Measurement results show 6.3-pJ/bit energy efficiency at a data rate of 30 Mb/s with -30-dB signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) tolerance, making it 18× energy efficient compared with state-of-the-art HBC transceivers.

A Low-Power Compact IEEE 802.15.6 Compatible Human Body Communication Transceiver With Digital Sigma–Delta IIR Mask Shaping

Human body communication (HBC) will play an important role in wireless body area networks (WBANs) because of its low power and low hardware cost. However, the low-frequency band of HBC transmitting signal could potentially interfere with the vital signs such as electrocardiography (ECG) and electromyography (EMG), especially for the frequency below 2 MHz. In this paper, a new mask-shaping technique is proposed for the HBC transmitter to suppress the mask below 2 MHz, where a digital sigma-delta truncated infinite impulse response (SDTIIR) filter provides sufficient rejection with a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) of only 8 bits. To save the die area, a single-ended receiver is designed with dc-coupled blocks, whereas a digital calibration technique is employed to eliminate the static dc offset. The proposed techniques are implemented in the 65 nm CMOS process, demonstrating a sub-millimeter-sized IEEE 802.15.6 compatible HBC transceiver chip. Measurements show that the transmitter achieves a rejection of -86.5 dBr at 2 MHz with 3.52 mW power. Consuming 620 <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">μ</sub> W , the receiver achieves a sensitivity of -72 dBm at a chip rate of 5.25 Mc/s and a bit error rate (BER) less than 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-7</sup> .

Design and feasibility study of human body communication transceiver based on FDM

The body area networks (BAN) are built by many wearable sensors to record, monitor or control the vital signals within the human body continuously. Human body communication (HBC) is a novel physical layer method to implement the BAN with low power consumption, low radiation, and strong anti-interference. However, the most existing HBC rarely consider the situation in which multiple sensors transmit data at the same time. The aim of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of frequency division multiplexing for human body communication multiplex data transmission. The signal was injected into the human body, and the human channel gain was measured by the spectrum analyzer. Two frequency signals were selected with smaller gain to design the transceiver. The transmitter used OOK modulation technology to design each functional unit, and the receiver recovered the original signal with a non-coherent demodulation method. The experimental results show that after the dual signals were transmitted through the human body, the receiver could recover the original signal correctly. In both static and dynamic situations, even if the transmission rate was as high as 115.2 kb/s, the bit error rate was only 10-4. The frequency division multiplexing scheme can be selected for multi-channel data transmission in human body communication.

A 5.2 mW IEEE 802.15.6 HBC Standard Compatible Transceiver With Power Efficient Delay-Locked-Loop Based BPSK Demodulator

A Low-power IEEE 802.15.6 human body communication (HBC) fully compatible transceiver is implemented in 130 nm CMOS process. In this work, the proposed HBC transceiver satisfying all the standard requirements has four key features for low power consumption which includes: 1) low-power analog active filters for TX spectral mask: 30% power reduction; 2) delayed locked loop (DLL) based BPSK receiver with the S/H operation for turning off unnecessary blocks: 40% power reduction; 3) low-power mode (LP-mode) receiver with the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) output data: 50% power reduction; and 4) reconfigurable LNA with RSSI output data: 60% power reduction. As a result, the proposed transceiver can fully satisfy the HBC standard requirements while consuming 5.2 mW from the 1.2 V supply.