The rapid increase in healthcare demand has seen novel developments in health monitoring technologies, such as the body area networks (BAN) paradigm. BAN technology envisions a network of continuously operating sensors, which measure critical physical and physiological parameters e.g., mobility, heart rate, and glucose levels. Wireless connectivity in BAN technology is key to its success as it grants portability and flexibility to the user. While radio frequency (RF) wireless technology has been successfully deployed in most BAN implementations, they consume a lot of battery power, are susceptible to electromagnetic interference and have security issues. Intrabody communication (IBC) is an alternative wireless communication technology which uses the human body as the signal propagation medium. IBC has characteristics that could naturally address the issues with RF for BAN technology. This survey examines the on-going research in this area and highlights IBC core fundamentals, current mathematical models of the human body, IBC transceiver designs, and the remaining research challenges to be addressed. IBC has exciting prospects for making BAN technologies more practical in the future.
Intrabody Communication (IBC) is a technique that uses the human body as a transmission medium for electrical signals to connect wearable electronic sensors and devices. Understanding the human body as the transmission medium in IBC paves way for practical implementation of IBC in body sensor networks. In this study, we propose a model for galvanic coupling-type IBC based on a simplified equivalent circuit representation of the human upper arm. We propose a new way to calculate the electrode-skin contact impedance. Based on the model and human experimental results, we discuss important characteristics of galvanic coupling-type IBC, namely, the effect of tissues, anthropometry of subjects, and electrode configuration on signal propagation. We found that the dielectric properties of the muscle primarily characterize the received signal when receiver electrodes are located close to transmitter electrodes. When receiver and transmitter electrodes are far apart, the skin dielectric property affects the received signal.
Over the past six decades there has been tremendous progress made in the field of medical implant communications. A comprehensive review of the progress, current state-of-the-art and future direction is presented in this chapter. Implanted Medical Devices (IMDs) are designed mainly for the purpose of diagnostic, therapeutic and assitive applications in heathcare, active living and sports technology. The primary target of implanted medical devices (IMDs) design revolve around reliable communications, sustainable power sources, high degree of miniaturisation while maintaining bio-compatibility to surrounding tissues adhering to the human safety limits set by appropriate guidelines. The role of internet of things (IoT) and intelligent data analysis in implant device networks as future research is presented. Lastly, in addition to reviewing the state-of-the art, a novel intuitive lower bound on implant size is presented.
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