Research Article
A Novel Galvanic Coupling Testbed Based on PC Sound Card for Intra-body Communication Links
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-030-34833-5_12, author={Anna Vizziello and Pietro Savazzi and Farzana Kulsoom and Giovanni Magenes and Paolo Gamba}, title={A Novel Galvanic Coupling Testbed Based on PC Sound Card for Intra-body Communication Links}, proceedings={Body Area Networks: Smart IoT and Big Data for Intelligent Health Management. 14th EAI International Conference, BODYNETS 2019, Florence, Italy, October 2-3, 2019, Proceedings}, proceedings_a={BODYNETS}, year={2019}, month={11}, keywords={Intra-body networks Intra-body communication Galvanic coupling technology Sensor networks}, doi={10.1007/978-3-030-34833-5_12} }- Anna Vizziello
Pietro Savazzi
Farzana Kulsoom
Giovanni Magenes
Paolo Gamba
Year: 2019
A Novel Galvanic Coupling Testbed Based on PC Sound Card for Intra-body Communication Links
BODYNETS
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-34833-5_12
Abstract
Intra-Body Communication (IBC) is an emerging research area that will transform the personalized medicine by allowing real time and in situ monitoring in daily life. A galvanic coupling (GC) technology is used in this work to send data through weak currents for intra-body links, as an energy efficient alternative to the current radio frequency (RF) solutions. A sound card based GC testbed is here designed and implemented, whose main features are: (i) low equipment requirements since it only employs two ordinary PCs and Matlab software, (ii) high flexibility because all the parameters setting may be modified through Matlab programs, and (iii) real time physiological data set transmissions. Experimental evaluation with a real chicken tissue are conducted in terms of bit error rate (BER) proving the feasibility of the proposed solution. The developed GC testbed may be easily replicated by the interested research community to carry out simulation-based experiments, thus fostering new research in this field.