High speed intra-body communication for personal health care

Intra-body communication (IBC) uses the conductive human body as the communication channel for data exchange. As the bio-sensor research is moving towards portable, wearable and implantable designs, IBC has significant potential applications for personal health care. Previous IBC research mainly focused on the electromagnetic (EM) IBC scheme, which resulted in low data rate (kbps). In this paper, we systematically studied the electric field (EF) IBC scheme, which enables 10 Mbps data rate. The human body channel is thoroughly measured with attenuation, noise and distortion for the IBC application. High speed EF IBC links are tested with various modulation schemes. The minimum transmission power of different links is measured.