On the capacitively coupled transmission channel for body network application

Intrabody communication using the human body as the transmission channel enables low-power wireless communication within a body area network. Using intelligent nodes it is expected that condensed information packets are transmitted between nodes reducing the data rate to a few kbit/s. This paper investigates the practical low-frequency transmission quality using capacitive signal coupling via custom-made electrodes. The coupled signal is conducted by the body and a 3 V_pp carrier amplitude enables practical transmission with a median bit error rate of around 20% (reduced to 2.5% with 5V_pp amplitude) using Manchester coding.