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A Novel Galvanic Coupling Testbed Based on PC Sound Card for Intra-body Communication Links

  • Anna VizzielloEmail author
  • Pietro Savazzi
  • Farzana Kulsoom
  • Giovanni Magenes
  • Paolo Gamba
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering book series (LNICST, volume 297)

Abstract

Intra-Body Communication (IBC) is an emerging research area that will transform the personalized medicine by allowing real time and in situ monitoring in daily life. A galvanic coupling (GC) technology is used in this work to send data through weak currents for intra-body links, as an energy efficient alternative to the current radio frequency (RF) solutions. A sound card based GC testbed is here designed and implemented, whose main features are: (i) low equipment requirements since it only employs two ordinary PCs and Matlab software, (ii) high flexibility because all the parameters setting may be modified through Matlab programs, and (iii) real time physiological data set transmissions. Experimental evaluation with a real chicken tissue are conducted in terms of bit error rate (BER) proving the feasibility of the proposed solution. 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.

Keywords

Intra-body networks Intra-body communication Galvanic coupling technology Sensor networks 
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Copyright information

© ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical EngineeringUniversity of PaviaPaviaItaly

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