Novel communication services based on human body and environment interaction: applications inside trains and applications for handicapped people

Abstract

We believe that near-field radio intra-body communications, wherein human body is used as the transmission medium, will be a very suitable solution for body area networks with many interesting applications towards a ubiquitous communication world. This paper presents some potential new applications of great usefulness for handicapped people. Moreover, we have also envisioned applications inside train coaches where the use of mobile phones is restricted in countries such as Japan. On the other hand, we present the system model designed to carry out these applications by using intra-body communications. Finally, in order to investigate the feasibility of this kind of communication, we analyze experimentally the characteristics of the intra-body propagation channels and we evaluate the performance of several digital modulation schemes