Challenges and implications of using ultrasonic communications in intra-body area networks

Body area networks (BANs) promise to enable revolutionary biomedical applications by wirelessly interconnecting devices implanted or worn by humans. However, BAN wireless communications based on radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic waves suffer from poor propagation of signals in body tissues, which leads to high levels of attenuation. In addition, in-body transmissions are constrained to be low-power to prevent overheating of tissues and consequent death of cells. To address the limitations of RF propagation in the human body, we propose a paradigm shift by exploring the use of ultrasonic waves as the physical medium to wirelessly interconnect in-body implanted devices. Acoustic waves are the transmission technology of choice for underwater communications, since they are known to propagate better than their RF counterpart in media composed mainly of water. Similarly, we envision that ultrasound (e.g., acoustic waves at non-audible frequencies) will provide support for communications in the human body, which is composed for 65% of water. In this paper, we first assess the feasibility of using ultrasonic communications in intra-body BANs, i.e., in-body networks where the devices are biomedical sensors that communicate with an actuator/gateway device located inside the body. We discuss the fundamentals of ultrasonic propagation in tissues, and explore important tradeoffs, including the choice of a transmission frequency, transmission power, bandwidth, and transducer size. Then, we discuss future research challenges for ultrasonic networking of intra-body devices at the physical, medium access and network layers of the protocol stack.