Characterization and Modeling of the Capacitive HBC Channel

The increasing interest in wireless body area networks has created the need for alternative communication schemes. One example of such schemes is the use of the human body as a communication medium. This technology is called human body communication (HBC), and it offers advantages over the most common radiation-based methods, which makes it an interesting alternative to implement body area networks. The aim of this paper is to identify the influence of a fixture on the HBC channel characterization, and an extended model that includes the test fixtures to explain the measured channel response is proposed. The model was tested against the channel measurement results, and a good experiment-model correlation was obtained. The results show that the test fixture has a nonnegligible influence and that an extended model, based on the physical meaning of the phenomena involved, helps to explain the channel frequency profile results and behavior.