DC powerline communication network for a wearable health monitoring system

Abstract

Wearable health monitoring networks are useful for many populations. We propose a network that relies on DC powerline communication for power and data transmission between nodes. By using powerline communication, we need only two conductors. We use a garment composed of conductive fabrics as the transmission medium. In this work, we evaluate the basic electronic transmission characteristics of such a garment. We model the 2D transmission that dominates the garment behavior, and present initial experimental results to verify our model.