Body Area Network – Connecting and powering things together around the body

Body Area Network (BAN) is an attractive means for continuous and pervasive health monitoring, providing connectivity and power to the sensors around the human body. Yet its unique and harsh environment gives circuit designers many challenges. As the human body absorbs the majority of RF energy around the GHz band, existing RF radio may not be ideal for communications between and on-body sensors, and so is the RF wireless power transfer. When it comes to energy harvesting, often the harvesting location is not aligned with the sensor location (a.k.a. location mismatch).

To solve the issues, this talk presents the Body Coupled Communication (BCC)-based BAN. BCC BAN utilizes the human body itself as a communication medium, which has orders of magnitude less pathloss when compared to RF in the BAN environment. We will begin with channel characteristics followed by design considerations and transceiver implementation examples. We will then look into what circuit designers should consider in such non-conventional environments. Low energy circuit techniques to overcome their limitations will also be addressed. Lastly, we will discuss the various system aspects of the BAN, including powering up the wearables using the wearable BAN.