PHY Design and Implementation of a Galvanic Coupling Testbed for Intra-Body Communication Links

Intra-body communication (IBC) is a novel key research area that will foster personalized medicine by allowing in situ and real time monitoring in daily life. In this work, the energy efficient galvanic coupling (GC) technology is used to send data through intra-body links. A novel sound card-based...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2020, Vol.8, p.184585-184597
Main Authors: Vizziello, Anna, Savazzi, Pietro, Magenes, Giovanni, Gamba, Paolo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
biomedical electronics
biomedical engineering
Coils
Communication
Control boards
Coupling
coupling circuits
Couplings
Data transmission
Electrodes
experimental testbed
galvanic coupling technology
implants
intra-body communication
Intra-body networks
Matlab
Parameter modification
Real time
Real-time systems
Receivers
Signal to noise ratio
Sound cards
Source code
Transmitters
wireless sensor network
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Summary:Intra-body communication (IBC) is a novel key research area that will foster personalized medicine by allowing in situ and real time monitoring in daily life. In this work, the energy efficient galvanic coupling (GC) technology is used to send data through intra-body links. A novel sound card-based GC testbed is designed and implemented, whose main features are: (i) low equipment requirements since it only employs two ordinary PCs with sound card support and Matlab software, (ii) high flexibility since all the parameters setting may be easily modified through the PC control panel and Matlab programs, (iii) real time physiological data transmissions, and (iv) almost error free communication by developing specific physical (PHY) layer techniques, which are implemented and tested with a real chicken tissue in the experimental evaluation. A signal to noise ratio (SNR) calculation is also proposed with the twofold purpose to be used for frequency offset compensation and as metric to evaluate the proposed architecture. The developed GC testbed may be easily replicated by the interested research community to carry out simulation-based experiments, thus fostering new research in this field. Moreover, the Matlab source code of the proposed GC transceiver is freely available online on Code Ocean.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3029862