Human-centric connectivity enabled by body-coupled communications

TLDR

The proliferation of mobile devices around the body creates a need for efficient wireless body‑area networks, and body‑coupled communications (BCC) use the human body as a propagation medium to provide human‑centric, proximity‑limited connectivity. This article reviews BCC as a viable foundation for future body‑area networks, illustrates its unique applications, outlines its fundamental properties and design trade‑offs, and proposes future research directions. The authors review BCC technology and detail its fundamental properties, modulation and protocol design trade‑offs, and challenges.

Abstract

With the growing number of mobile devices surrounding a person's body, there is an increasing need to connect this electronic equipment efficiently into a wireless body-area network. In this article we review the body-coupled communications technology, which we show to be a viable basis for future BANs. In BCC, the human body is used as a signal propagation medium, which provides a key benefit - the communication is centered around the user and limited to his or her close proximity, that is, this technology provides human-centric connectivity. This enables unique applications that are illustrated in this work. Moreover, we outline the fundamental properties of the BCC technology and provide different trade-offs and challenges for modulation and protocol design. This article also discusses the outlook for BCC and suggests a number of important research topics.