Characterization and Classification of Human Body Channel as a function of Excitation and Termination Modalities

TL;DR

This study extensively characterizes human body communication channels across various interaction scenarios and configurations, revealing how form-factor and excitation modes influence channel loss and performance.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive measurement and classification of human body channels for multiple scenarios and excitation configurations, explaining variations in channel loss.

Findings

Wearable-wearable channels exhibit the highest loss (-50 dB).

Excitation mode affects channel loss depending on length; differential suits short channels, single-ended suits long.

Channel loss varies significantly with interaction type and configuration.

Abstract

Human Body Communication (HBC) has recently emerged as an alternative to radio frequency transmission for connecting devices on and in the human body with order(s) of magnitude lower energy. The communication between these devices can give rise to different scenarios, which can be classified as wearable-wearable, wearable-machine, machine-machine interactions. In this paper, for the first time, the human body channel characteristics is measured for a wide range of such possible scenarios (14 vs. a few in previous literature) and classified according to the form-factor of the transmitter and receiver. The effect of excitation/termination configurations on the channel loss is also explored, which helps explain the previously unexplained wide variation in HBC Channel measurements. Measurement results show that wearable-wearable interaction has the maximum loss (upto -50 dB) followed by wearable-machine and machinemachine interaction (min loss of 0.5 dB), primarily due to the small ground size of the wearable devices. Among the excitation configurations, differential excitation is suitable for small channel length whereas single ended is better for longer channel.