Body Area Network – Connecting and Powering Things Together Around the Human Body

With the era of wearables and IoT, Body Area Network (BAN) is becoming an attractive means for communication and powering around the human body, yet its unique and harsh environment gives circuit designers many challenges. As the human body absorbs most of the RF energy around GHz band, existing RF radio may not be an ideal. To address these issues, this talk presents the BAN using Body Coupled Communication (BCC) and Body Coupled Powering (BCP); these utilize the human body itself as a communication/powering medium, which has orders of magnitude less pathloss when compared to RF based radio when adjacent to human body. We will cover the channel characteristics followed by design considerations and transceiver implementation examples. I will then discuss what circuit designers should consider in such non-conventional environments. We will then review their various system aspects of the BAN, including powering up the wearables using BAN.