Body Mass Index (BMI) Effect on Galvanic Coupling Intra-Body Communication

Abstract

Intra-body communication (IBC) is a wireless communication system where human body is used as a signal transmission medium. Main advantage of IBC compared to other wireless communication is capable of low power consumption. There are two coupling methods in IBC, which are capacitive and galvanic coupling. The characteristic of human body play an important role in IBC because the transmitted signal is propagates through the body tissue. Therefore, this paper investigates the effect of different dielectric properties of body tissues to the quality of IBC signal transmission by focusing at body fat. Galvanic coupling method was used. 12 subjects were volunteered in this study and the value of subject’s body fat was differentiates by body mass index (BMI). The frequency was focused on 21 MHz, 50 MHz and 80 MHz. The signal quality at 21 MHz and 80 MHz shows the degradation as the increasing of body fat. The signal attenuation is increasing as body fat increased because in human body, the bone and fat has higher resistance than nerves and muscle. However, at frequency 50 MHz, the increasing of human BMI does not increase the attenuation where the attenuations are at peak value.