Exploring Human Body Communications for IoT Enabled Ambulatory Health Monitoring Systems

Increasing market demand for high performance and portable computing devices requires energy efficient devices. When a network of devices is considered, as in the case of the Internet of Things, it is important to consider low power design at the sensor/actuator level as well as in the sensor network. Human body communication has proven to be an efficient mode of communication for near field body sensor network applications. In this paper we propose an architecture for an ambulatory health monitoring system using a body coupled communication channel. The proposed architecture can be used for smart health monitoring as part of the Internet of Things. The design was validated using Simulink. A 31% power reduction was observed in the proposed monitoring system when human body communication was used.