A Novel Galvanic Coupling Testbed Based on PC Sound Card for Intra-body Communication Links

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.