Low energy wireless body area network systems

As a key technology for short range communication around the human body, wireless body area network (WBAN) has been recently emerged by combining medical, lifestyle, and entertainment applications. In this paper, we overview the WBAN technology and summary its status of the standardization which consists of common media access control layer (MAC) and three types of physical layers (PHYs). Among three PHYs, we introduce an energy-efficient body channel communication (BCC) PHY, which uses the human body as a communication channel with equivalent circuit modeling via distributed RC circuits and theoretical channel analysis by solving the Maxwell's equations. Through the clear understanding of the body channel, we present 6 BCC transceivers implemented with CMOS technology, including a world-first WBAN transceiver satisfying all of the specifications for IEEE 802.15.6 standard. Finally, the MP3 player and healthcare demonstrations employing BCC transceiver are shown to verify the energy-efficiency and feasibility for low energy wireless body area network systems.