An Experimental Study of Digital Communication System with Human Body as Communication Channel

Abstract

For a long time, people have carried out various studies on human body communication (HBC) in order to establish a suitable communication link through human body. However, in the galvanic coupled method of HBC, the high current intensity is rarely used to implement the communication link. In the medical field, functional electrical stimulation (FES) is often used to send high intensity electrical pulses to make muscles contract, and this contraction phenomenon will generate surface electromyography (sEMG) signals on the surface of human skins. According to this principle and the galvanic coupling method of HBC, we propose a new digital communication system based on FES and sEMG signal detection with human body as communication channel in this paper. We modulate the transmitted signal into electrical stimulation to stimulate the muscles and detect the sEMG signal caused by it to achieve a complete communication process. The framework of the entire communication system is proposed. Its error performance for different stimulation parameters is tested and evaluated by experiments. Using FES and sEMG signal detection, our work makes a new exploration of HBC at high current intensities and enables a complete communication link. This work is expected to be applied to the HBC design combined with electrical stimulation in medical field.