Wearable Health Monitoring Using Capacitive Voltage-Mode Human Body Communication
  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).
