Live Demonstration: Human Body Communication Health Monitoring System Using Flexible Substrate

We demonstrate the design and functionality of a flexible, miniaturized, ultra-low power, and affordable health monitoring system enabling continuous monitoring of individuals' health metrics, a.k.a. a wireless body area network (WBAN). To date, the most commonly-used means of communication for WBAN modules has been based on Radio Frequency (RF) communications. Though they significantly facilitated human healthcare monitoring, they require complex, power-hungry, RF front ends. As an alternative, we design our system to communicate utilizing human body communication (HBC), which has inherent physical layer security and enhanced overall energy efficiency. The live demo presents a vital signal monitoring system based on point-to-point HBC communication. Fig. 1 illustrates the transmitter and receiver diagrams and PCB boards respectively. The transmitter comprises a microcontroller, an oscillator, an on-off-keying (OOK) modulator, and signal/ground electrodes. A 3.7 V lithium-ion battery with a 3.3 V output low dropout regulator (LDO) powers the whole system. The receiver first detects the envelope of the received signal and slices it to binary digits by comparing the input signal with its average level extracted by low-pass filtering. Interested readers can find full details at [1], where the system has shown an energy efficiency of 8.3 nJ/b at a data rate of up to 1.3 Mbps.