A study on intra-body communication for personal healthcare monitoring system

In this paper we propose the use of intra-body communication (IBC) for a personal health monitoring system employing inexpensive, lightweight, miniature sensor platforms. Body area networks (BANs) with physiological sensors will improve current healthcare services and at the same time significantly reduce costs to public health systems. We are primarily looking to reduce the transmission power consumption of the wireless communication links by using very low power IBC to connect the BAN sensors, a change which has also been shown to increase the durability of the sensors. There has been no specific study carried out to date on the optimal modulation scheme for such IBC. For this reason, we investigate the transmission characteristics of the human body as a conductor of signal up to 2.4 GHz by considering different transmitter power consumption and data transmission rates. We believe that an optimal modulation scheme for IBC would allow an increase of the data transmission bit rate in our personal health monitoring system model, therefore we evaluated the performance of two different modulation schemes, QPSK and BPSK. Our experiment is conducted with point-to-point communication between an Electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor located in the chest region and a central hub located on the left wrist.