Low Energy Wearable Body-Sensor-Network

Abstract

Wearable body sensor network (WBSN) is realized with wireless and wireline techniques. Body channel communication (BCC), which uses the human body as a signal transmission medium, can reduce energy consumption of a wireless on-body transceiver to less than 0.5nJ/b. The 3 pulse-based transceivers for BCC are reviewed in this paper, and their interference issues are discussed. To enhance BCC robustness, an adaptive frequency hopping scheme is applied. Fabric Area Network (FAN) is introduced with a low energy inductive coupling transceiver and a fault-tolerant switch to realize intra- and inter-layer WBSN at once. Unique wearable environment issues and the adaptation technique to overcome those issues are discussed.