ECG monitoring via Capacitive Body Coupled Communications

Personal Area Networks (PANs) used around the Human Body, often called Body Area Networks (BANs), are being developed in order to provide reliable communication services between personal devices, gadgets and sensors. Capacitive Body Coupled Communications (BCC) are promising to overcome existing problems of available commercial solutions (like Zigbee and Bluetooth), as they intrinsically have low power consumption and produce almost no interference. As BCC use near field Capacitive Coupling, the fields used to transfer energy are confined only to a short range around the source and the human body, and decrease at a much higher rate with distance than radiation fields. The short abrupt range characteristic can be advantageous for keeping the network safe and without causing interference in nearby PANs, but puts a big challenge in the receiver design, namely the requirements of gain, high input impedance, low noise and very low input capacitance. This paper presents an ECG acquisition system connected by BCC to a mobile device. This demonstration proves that BCC has ”enough performance” and is a promising solution for health-care monitoring.