UC Irvine

Mobile health has recently expanded to include wearable devices as a part of the vision of a holistic approach to wellness in general and health care services in particular. Once wearables become ubiquitous, they can provide healthy users, patients and doctors with an accurate reflection of the state of their body. This information will ultimately lead to better preventative medical practices and a truly personalized medical approach. Driven by the vision of a cable-free biomedical monitoring system, new wireless technologies that focus on sensor applications have been promoted as the next biomedical revolution, promising a significant improvement in the quality of health-care services. However, a major barrier to adoption of wearable technologies is the size and power requirements of wireless sensors which are typically dominated by the Radio Frequency (RF) section of the associated transceivers. There is a need to have a new class of devices that are small in area and exhibit ultra-low power consumption. An attractive solution to such emerging vision is the use of intra-body communication (IBC) systems where data transmission is achieved through the body rather than through air. Sensors and actuators can then inter-communicate through body and be relayed to a centralized wireless hub that could be a smart watch for instance. This technique would ultimately lead to body area networks (BANs) that operate at extremely low power, with minimal foot print by replacing expensive, power consuming Radio Frequency front ends, for each individual node with simpler interfaces.

In this work, we study and explore the characteristics, nature, specifications and potential of the IBC technology. We introduce novel approaches to accurately model this new channel, through simulation techniques as well as physical ones, in form of physical phantoms, to understand and model the channel behavior and relation between the system’s different components. This work aims at providing a platform for the design of body area networks that adopt IBC as means of connection between the network’s nodes. Finally, possible applications that uniquely utilize such technology are introduced, verifying its potential to boost the healthcare field.