Human Body Wire

Human Body Wire

Using the Human Body as a High Bandwidth
(2 Mb/s) Signal Path

At ISSCC 2006, researchers from the EECS department of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) demonstrated prototype circuits that use the human body as the signal path. Figure 1 shows the proposed concept of using parts of the human body to carry the signal from the music player to the headphone. Researchers from KAIST stated that their goal in the research of the HBC concept was to seek a viable alternative to the use of Bluetooth technology.

The table below compares the performance characteristics of Human Body Communications (HBC) to that of Bluetooth technology. HBC compares favorably to Bluetooth in terms of higher datarate and lower power consumption. Consequently, the researchers from KAIST are currently seeking to commercialize HBC technology and use the human body as the carrier path for a personal communications network. While almost all papers at ISSCC require actual silicon, the researchers from KAIST had a more compelling demonstration; an iPod nano was modified to use HBC to send audio across a journalists body to a nearby speaker