An empirical investigation of the capacitive Body Coupled Communications channel for Body Area Networks

Body Coupled Communication (BCC) systems use the human body as the medium through which a signal is transmitted to connect devices placed in, on or in close proximity to the human body. To enable good BCC system design, the BCC channel has to be very well understood. In this paper the BCC channel was empirically investigated by carrying out several experiments. First the BCC channel was characterized for static body conditions. Then, the off body radiation was measured to try and understand the propagation of the signal energy away from the body. It was found that the BCC channel is frequency selective, but offers a low propagation loss in certain frequency bands. The frequency band with the most favorable characteristics for wireless systems was found to be between 280MHz and 500MHz. Finally, the off-body radiation experiments showed that the signal power decreased rapidly when the receiving coupler was placed away from the body.