Live Wire – A Low-Complexity Body Channel Communication System for Landmark Identification

This paper presents a robust simplex Body Channel Communication (BCC) system aimed at providing an interactive infrastructure solution for visually impaired people. Compared to existing BCC solutions, it provides high versatility, wearability and installability in an environment in a low complexity hardware-software solution. It operates with a ground referred–transmitter (TX) and it is based on an asynchronous threshold receiver (RX) architecture. Synchronization, demodulation and packetizing and threshold control are completely software defined and implemented using MicroPython. The RX includes Bluetooth® (BT) radio connectivity and a cell-phone application provides push text-to-speech notifications to a smartphone. The hardware achieves a Packet Error Rate (PER) of
$\sim$
0.1 at 550 kHz pulse center frequency, Synchronized-On Off Keying (S-OOK) modulation and 1 kbps data rate, for an average current consumption of 44 mA.