Wearable or implantable biomedical devices can be used for health management using body area connectivity. There is one approach to implementing on-body networks using the human body as a transmission medium, called Body Channel Communication (BCC). Recently proposed BCC schemes use the human body itself as the data transmission medium. Historically, near-field electrostatic coupling using a low frequency signal was first to be developed, but, it is dependent on the conditions of the surrounding environment such as the earth ground for the return path, and it has limited data rate due to the narrow bandwidth of 400kHz. Another scheme employing an electromagnetic wave of 10MHz also suffers from the bandwidth limitation of conventional FM and FSK. Alternatively, a recently developed transceiver using an electroopic sensor to achieve data rates of 10Mb/s requires a special off-chip sensor, resulting in high cost, high power consumption, and low integration level.
  This project presents a new human body communication method, a wideband signaling transceiver with a direct-coupled interfaceto achieve lower power consumption and higher data rate. In addition, it uses only a single electrode for data transmission, in contrast to other methods which require the off-chip sensor to detect the electric field and the earth ground path.

  - ISSCC 06 [pdf]

  - ISWC 06 [pdf]

  - EMBC 07 [pdf]

  - JSSC 07 [pdf]