However, the potential of capacitive BCC for the aforesaid applications could be fully utilized by understanding the realistic interaction of the capacitive coupler, the human body (electrophysiological properties of tissues), and the environment for different scenarios and communication distances. The capacitive BCC has an advantage over other wireless technologies like Bluetooth and Zig-bee in the context of personal area network (PAN) and internet-of-things (IOT) due to lower power consumption and confinement of radiated energy, thus requiring less allocation of special frequency bands for communication. The useful frequency range falls between hundreds of kHz to tens of MHz. IntroductionĬapacitive body-coupled communication (BCC) is considered an enabling short-range wireless technology for the interaction between humans and the smarter ambiance. The estimated propagation loss has been used to investigate the link-budget requirement for designing capacitive BCC system in CMOS sub-micron technologies. The propagation loss has also been explained for complex scenarios formed by the ground-plane and the material structures (metals or dielectrics) with the human body.

The propagation loss is less for arm positions when they are not touching the torso region irrespective of the communication distance. The simulation results show that the vertical coupler configuration is less susceptible to physiological variations of underlying tissues compared to the horizontal coupler configuration. The presented simulation approach is first evaluated for numerical/human body variation uncertainties and then validated with measurement results from literature, followed by the analysis of capacitive BCC channel for twenty different scenarios. Therefore, an alternate efficient full-wave electromagnetic (EM) simulation approach is presented to realistically analyze capacitive BCC, that is, the interaction of capacitive coupler, the human body, and the environment all together.

This is either because of experimental complexity to isolate the earth-ground or design complexity in realizing a reliable communication link to assess the performance limitations of capacitive BCC channel. Measured propagation loss for capacitive body-coupled communication (BCC) channel (1 MHz to 60 MHz) is limitedly available in the literature for distances longer than 50 cm.

Cst em simulation