Maity Shovan, Das Debayan, Sen Shreyas
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2017 Jul;2017:1-4. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2017.8036748.
Rapid miniaturization and cost reduction of computing, along with the availability of wearable and implantable physiological sensors have led to the growth of human Body Area Network (BAN) formed by a network of such sensors and computing devices. One promising application of such a network is wearable health monitoring where the collected data from the sensors would be transmitted and analyzed to assess the health of a person. Typically, the devices in a BAN are connected through wireless (WBAN), which suffers from energy inefficiency due to the high-energy consumption of wireless transmission. Human Body Communication (HBC) uses the relatively low loss human body as the communication medium to connect these devices, promising order(s) of magnitude better energy-efficiency and built-in security compared to WBAN. In this paper, we demonstrate a health monitoring device and system built using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) sensors and components, that can collect data from physiological sensors and transmit it through a) intra-body HBC to another device (hub) worn on the body or b) upload health data through HBC-based human-machine interaction to an HBC capable machine. The system design constraints and signal transfer characteristics for the implemented HBC-based wearable health monitoring system are measured and analyzed, showing reliable connectivity with >8× power savings compared to Bluetooth low-energy (BTLE).
计算能力的快速小型化和成本降低，以及可穿戴和可植入生理传感器的出现，促使了由此类传感器和计算设备组成的人体区域网络（BAN）的发展。这种网络的一个有前景的应用是可穿戴健康监测，即传感器收集的数据将被传输并分析，以评估个人健康状况。通常，BAN中的设备通过无线（WBAN）连接，由于无线传输的高能耗，这种连接方式存在能源效率低下的问题。人体通信（HBC）利用人体相对较低的损耗作为通信介质来连接这些设备，与WBAN相比，有望实现更高的能源效率和内置安全性。在本文中，我们展示了一种使用商用现货（COTS）传感器和组件构建的健康监测设备和系统，该系统可以从生理传感器收集数据，并通过以下方式进行传输：a）通过体内HBC传输到佩戴在身体上的另一个设备（集线器）；b）通过基于HBC的人机交互将健康数据上传到支持HBC的机器上。对所实现的基于HBC的可穿戴健康监测系统的系统设计约束和信号传输特性进行了测量和分析，结果表明，与低功耗蓝牙（BTLE）相比，该系统具有可靠的连接性，且节能超过8倍。
