Low Power Wearable Audio Player Using Human Body Communications

Abstract

This paper presents a prototype wearable audio player system to playback the digital audio signal transmitted through the wearer's body without any wire. To significantly reduce the power consumption of the digital audio transmission, the system exploits a novel wideband signaling human body communication scheme. The transceiver chip designed, fabricated, and assembled on the prototype system shows 5-mW power consumption at 2-Mb/s data rate, better than the Bluetooth transceiver. Real-time audio playing through the human body is successfully demonstrated.