BodySense: An Expandable and Wearable-Sized Wireless Evaluation Platform for Human Body Communication
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Feb 7, 2025
Abstract
Wearable, wirelessly connected sensors have become a common part of daily
life and have the potential to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of
personalized healthcare. A key challenge in this evolution is designing
long-lasting and unobtrusive devices. These design requirements inherently
demand smaller batteries, inevitably increasing the need for energy-sensitive
wireless communication interfaces. Capacitive Human Body Communication (HBC) is
a promising, power-efficient alternative to traditional RF-based communication,
enabling point-to-multipoint data and energy exchange. However, as this concept
relies on capacitive coupling to the surrounding area, it is naturally
influenced by uncontrollable environmental factors, making testing with
classical setups particularly challenging. This work presents a customizable,
wearable-sized, wireless evaluation platform for capacitive HBC, designed to
enable realistic evaluation of wearable-to-wearable applications. Comparative
measurements of channel gains were conducted using classical grid-connected and
wireless Data Acquisition (DAQ) across various transmission distances within
the frequency range of 4 MHz to 64 MHz and revealed an average overestimation
of 18.15 dB over all investigated distances in the classical setup.
