An Empirical Measurement of Signal Attenuation and BER of IEEE 802.15.6 HBC using a phantom solution

The implementation of an IEEE 802.15.6 section 10 com- pliant human body communications (HBC) transceiver re- quires an understanding of the signal integrity expected at the receiver. This paper focuses on the reception of IEEE 802.15.6 compliant data packets through the human body. The experiment used a phantom solution to model the elec- trical characteristics of muscle tissue in a controlled envi- ronment. The prototype transmitter was able to achieve a power consumption of 4.5nJ per bit using FPGA technology at the minimum spreading factor, while a minimum chan- nel attenuation of 11.4dB was measured at 21MHz. Further characterisation of the human body communications channel will be possible with the future development of a portable prototype, optimising the receiver design using the empirical results presented here.