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Low Power Wireless On-Body Communication for Body-attached Sensor Nodes
Wearable, wirelessly connected sensors have become a common part of daily life, evolving step by step from their roots in sports and fitness to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of personalized healthcare. A key challenge in this evolution is designing devices that are unobtrusive, highly integrated, and energy efficient. These design requirements inherently demand smaller batteries, which must also support the significant power consumption of wireless communication interfaces. Capacitive Human Body Communication (HBC) offers a promising, power-efficient alternative to traditional RF-based communication, enabling point-to-multipoint data and energy exchange.
By using the conductive properties of the human body, a privacy-preserving wireless personal body area network (WBAN) can be created. Several low-power sensors such as ECG-tracker and insulin pumps can act as leaf devices, sending personal data to a body-central gateway, such as a smartwatch that further processes the data and establishes a connection to the cloud.
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Keywords: Hardware design, Firmware design, analog circuit design, digital circuit design, signal processing, field evaluation
Wearable, wirelessly connected sensors have become a common part of daily life, evolving step by step from their roots in sports and fitness to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of personalized healthcare. A key challenge in this evolution is designing devices that are unobtrusive, highly integrated, and energy efficient. These design requirements inherently demand smaller batteries, which must also support the significant power consumption of wireless communication interfaces. Capacitive Human Body Communication (HBC) offers a promising, power-efficient alternative to traditional RF-based communication, enabling point-to-multipoint data and energy exchange.
By using the conductive properties of the human body, a privacy-preserving wireless personal body area network (WBAN) can be created. Several low-power sensors such as ECG-tracker and insulin pumps can act as leaf devices, sending personal data to a body-central gateway, for example, a smartwatch that further processes the data and establishes a connection to the cloud.
Wearable, wirelessly connected sensors have become a common part of daily life, evolving step by step from their roots in sports and fitness to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of personalized healthcare. A key challenge in this evolution is designing devices that are unobtrusive, highly integrated, and energy efficient. These design requirements inherently demand smaller batteries, which must also support the significant power consumption of wireless communication interfaces. Capacitive Human Body Communication (HBC) offers a promising, power-efficient alternative to traditional RF-based communication, enabling point-to-multipoint data and energy exchange. By using the conductive properties of the human body, a privacy-preserving wireless personal body area network (WBAN) can be created. Several low-power sensors such as ECG-tracker and insulin pumps can act as leaf devices, sending personal data to a body-central gateway, for example, a smartwatch that further processes the data and establishes a connection to the cloud.
From a long-term perspective, this project aims to design an ultra-low power hardware platform that is capable of sending and receiving data and power over the human body, eventually creating battery-free and self-sustaining body-attached sensor nodes. To achieve this, ultra-low power hardware design has to be combined with energy harvesting, efficient data encoding with error correction, and intelligent on-board processing (also machine learning). Extensive in-field evaluations will prove the functionality of sub-systems and, finally, of the whole system.
Depending on the student’s interest, the desired thesis level (Bachelor-, Semester-, Master thesis), and the availability, a specific subset of tasks will be defined in agreement with the student.
Requirements
• Experience in C-programming with microcontrollers
• Experience in Python
• Knowledge of analog and/or digital circuit design
• Motivated to learn new concepts
Type of Work
• 30 % Hardware integration
• 30 % Firmware development
• 20 % In-field evaluation
• 10 % Hardware evaluation and integration
• 10 % Data analysis and documentation
From a long-term perspective, this project aims to design an ultra-low power hardware platform that is capable of sending and receiving data and power over the human body, eventually creating battery-free and self-sustaining body-attached sensor nodes. To achieve this, ultra-low power hardware design has to be combined with energy harvesting, efficient data encoding with error correction, and intelligent on-board processing (also machine learning). Extensive in-field evaluations will prove the functionality of sub-systems and, finally, of the whole system. Depending on the student’s interest, the desired thesis level (Bachelor-, Semester-, Master thesis), and the availability, a specific subset of tasks will be defined in agreement with the student.
Requirements • Experience in C-programming with microcontrollers • Experience in Python • Knowledge of analog and/or digital circuit design • Motivated to learn new concepts
Type of Work • 30 % Hardware integration • 30 % Firmware development • 20 % In-field evaluation • 10 % Hardware evaluation and integration • 10 % Data analysis and documentation
Lukas Schulthess (lukas.schulthess@pbl.ee.ethz.ch)
Dr. Philipp Mayer (mayerph@iis.ee.ethz.ch)
Lukas Schulthess (lukas.schulthess@pbl.ee.ethz.ch) Dr. Philipp Mayer (mayerph@iis.ee.ethz.ch)
2025_FS_on_body_communication.pdf
