A 10.8mW body-channel-communication/MICS dual-band transceiver for a unified body-sensor-network controller

With the increasing number of portable and implantable personal health care devices, there is a strong demand to control their communication in a single wireless network. Recently, the IEEE 802.15 WBAN task group has discussed the combining of wearable and implantable body sensor networks (BSNs), but no real chip implementation has been reported. In this paper, the implementation of a unified BSN is described. The unified BSN combines low-power body-channel communication (BCC) and versatile medical implant communication service (MICS) using a network controller located on the human body. This unified BSN has 2 main advantages over the conventional BSNs. First, the MICS band antenna shared with the BCC electrode can be attached directly to human skin to shorten the communication distances among the controller and implanted radios, relaxing their sensitivity and selectivity requirements. Second, due to low path loss of the human body channel, low-power communication is possible among the wearable devices. In addition, the on-body sensors do not need external antennas because the bio-signal sensing electrode functions as the interface for data transmission.