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

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Body Area Networks: Smart IoT and Big Data for Intelligent Health Management (BODYNETS 2019)

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering, University of Pavia, 27100, Pavia, Italy

    Anna Vizziello, Pietro Savazzi, Farzana Kulsoom, Giovanni Magenes & Paolo Gamba

Authors
  1. Anna Vizziello
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  2. Pietro Savazzi
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  3. Farzana Kulsoom
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  4. Giovanni Magenes
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  5. Paolo Gamba
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anna Vizziello .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Lorenzo Mucchi

  2. Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Matti Hämäläinen

  3. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Sara Jayousi

  4. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Simone Morosi

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© 2019 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

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Vizziello, A., Savazzi, P., Kulsoom, F., Magenes, G., Gamba, P. (2019). A Novel Galvanic Coupling Testbed Based on PC Sound Card for Intra-body Communication Links. In: Mucchi, L., Hämäläinen, M., Jayousi, S., Morosi, S. (eds) Body Area Networks: Smart IoT and Big Data for Intelligent Health Management. BODYNETS 2019. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 297. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34833-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34833-5_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34832-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34833-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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