Title: Wearable Health Monitoring Using Capacitive Voltage-Mode Human Body Communication,
Abstract: Rapid miniaturization and cost reduction of computing, along with the
availability of wearable and implantable physiological sensors have led to the
growth of human Body Area Network (BAN) formed by a network of such sensors and
computing devices. One promising application of such a network is wearable
health monitoring where the collected data from the sensors would be
transmitted and analyzed to assess the health of a person. Typically, the
devices in a BAN are connected through wireless (WBAN), which suffers from
energy inefficiency due to the high-energy consumption of wireless
transmission. Human Body Communication (HBC) uses the relatively low loss human
body as the communication medium to connect these devices, promising order(s)
of magnitude better energy-efficiency and built-in security compared to WBAN.
In this paper, we demonstrate a health monitoring device and system built using
Commercial-Off-The- Shelf (COTS) sensors and components, that can collect data
from physiological sensors and transmit it through a) intra-body HBC to another
device (hub) worn on the body or b) upload health data through HBC-based
human-machine interaction to an HBC capable machine. The system design
constraints and signal transfer characteristics for the implemented HBC-based
wearable health monitoring system are measured and analyzed, showing reliable
connectivity with >8x power savings compared to Bluetooth lowenergy (BTLE).