Investigation on error performance for galvanic-type intra-body Communication with Experiment

Intra-body Communication (EBC), which utilizes the human body act as communication channel, offers a novel technology for information exchange in Biomedical Engineering (BME) field. Galvanic-type IBC has been a promising choice for IBC because of its advantages like lesser interference to the nearby environment and lower frequency operation. Bit Error Rate (BER) is a standard figure of merit to indicate the error performance of communication channel. For low frequency and low transmit rate in galvanic-type IBC, the traditional method of BER measurement is time-consuming. Furthermore, to measure through the human body for such a long time is neither practical nor feasible without physiological changes. In order to evaluate the error performance of galvanic-type IBC, this paper presents an alternate approach to investigate BER values of the channel and verifies its behaviors with human lower arm experiment. After comparing the experimental results and theoretical calculation based on ideal Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, it is found that their traces have similar agreement. Besides, the experimental phenomenon indicates the assumptions that channel noise of galvanic-type IBC has AWGN characteristic are reasonable and applicable in some regions.