A Body Surface Coordinator for Implanted Biosensor Networks

Biomedical sensors can be implanted and networked in the human body for health monitor, diagnosis, treatment or as a prosthetic device. Life time and heat generated by implant due to communication and circuitry power consumption are big concerns. This paper presents a new network architecture for long range communications in the implanted sensor networks. We measured the on-body propagation around body surface and in-body propagation through tissue in the frequency ranges of 403 MHz and 2.45 GHz. We have found that the in-body path loss is more than that of on-body. To exploit the path loss difference, we propose to introduce a body surface coordinator which has more resources to the implanted sensor networks. Instead of only routing data among implants, the coordinator on the body surface can forward data from one implant to another over long distance more safely and efficiently.