Design and Implementation of Galvanic Coupling Intra-Body Communication Transceivers using Differential Phase Shift Keying

Abstract

Intra-body communications (IBC) is a short-range wireless communication technology, which has been included as the third physical layer in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. Up till the present moment, it is difficult to achieve a high-data-rate galvanic coupling IBC system, which is one of the main problems limiting the development of implanted medical sensors. In this paper, the modulation scheme of differential phase shift keying (DPSK) and coherent demodulation method of Costas loop are adopted in FPGA to design a galvanic coupling IBC transceiver system with low coupling amplitude and high data rate. By means of in vivo experiments, the data acquisition card is used to acquire the transmission data and calculate the bit error rate within a certain range of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The system achieves reliable transmission in the human body at a data rate of up to 1 Mbps under a low coupling amplitude, which provides a reference for the future development of IBC in the wearable or implantable medical sensors.