Design and feasibility study of human body communication transceiver based on FDM

The body area networks (BAN) are built by many wearable sensors to record, monitor or control the vital signals within the human body continuously. Human body communication (HBC) is a novel physical layer method to implement the BAN with low power consumption, low radiation, and strong anti-interference. However, the most existing HBC rarely consider the situation in which multiple sensors transmit data at the same time.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of frequency division multiplexing for human body communication multiplex data transmission.

The signal was injected into the human body, and the human channel gain was measured by the spectrum analyzer. Two frequency signals were selected with smaller gain to design the transceiver. The transmitter used OOK modulation technology to design each functional unit, and the receiver recovered the original signal with a non-coherent demodulation method.

The experimental results show that after the dual signals were transmitted through the human body, the receiver could recover the original signal correctly. In both static and dynamic situations, even if the transmission rate was as high as 115.2 kb/s, the bit error rate was only 10-4.

The frequency division multiplexing scheme can be selected for multi-channel data transmission in human body communication.