Electro - Quasistatic Body Communication for Biopotential Applications

The current state of the art in biopotential recordings rely on radiative electromagnetic (EM) fields. In such transmissions, only a small fraction of this energy is received since the EM fields are widely radiated resulting in lossy inefficient systems. Using the body as a communication medium (similar to a ’wire’) allows for the containment of the energy within the body, yielding order(s) of magnitude lower energy than radiative EM communication. The first part of this work introduces Animal Body Communication for untethered rodent biopotential recording and for the first time this work develops the theory and models for animal body communication circuitry and channel loss. In vivo experimental analysis proves that ABC successfully transmits acquired electrocardiogram (EKG) signals through the body with correlation greater than 99% when compared to traditional wireless communication modalities, with a 50x reduction in power consumption. The second part of this work focusses on the analysis and design of an Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication (EQS-HBC) system for simultaneous sensing and transmission of biopotential signals. In this work, detailed analysis on the system level interaction between the sensing and transmitting circuitry is studied and a design to enable simultaneous sensing and transmission is proposed. Experimental analysis was performed to understand the interaction between the Right Leg-Drive circuitry and the HBC transmission along with the effect of the ADC quantization on signal quality. Finally, experimental trials proves that EKG signals can be transmitted through the body with greater than 96% correlation when compared to Bluetooth systems at extremely low powers.