Poster Abstract: Zero-Power Receiver for Touch Communication and Touch Sensing

Intra-body and extra-body communication is an attractive wireless communication method for wearable devices and their applications. In this work, we present the architecture, the design and the implementation of a novel zero-power receiver optimized for intra-body and extra-body communication and on-off keying modulation. The receiver includes an energy-harvesting subsystem that extracts energy from the received message to supply the low power circuits. The proposed zero-power receiver is able to receive and to parse data, as well as wake up external logic when a specific address is detected. The receiver can be used both as an always-on touch sensor to be deployed in the field and as a body communication wake up radio to other nodes on the human body. Experimental results with in-field measurements demonstrate the zero-power of the proposed device and that it is possible to achieve more than 1.70m in intra-body communication and hand-shake information exchange without the use of any external battery.