A Quick Introduction to Human Body Communication (HBC)

Human Body Communication (HBC) technology offers a more secure way to communicate information between wearable electronic devices. HBC has many advantages such as only using electrodes, small interference, low power consumption, short time setup which is extremely suitable for ubiquitous computing as well as healthcare system.

HBC for Medical Devices and Wearable facilitates many uses as the human body is used as a transmission medium to issue real-time data about a patient's health to a care seeker or a physician. Also, it allows a capability of live monitoring which can assist in alarming the patient about their health status or assist in early prevention or detection of risks associated with health; not to mention interoperability. It can be integrated with many medical devices to facilitate the interaction between medical practitioners and the patient.

Some of the key applications of HBC include:

1.   While physical keys can be easily lost or stolen, a HBC transmission system can enable secure access to gated spaces by adding a biometric security to a door using fingerprint sensors on phones.

2.   HBC can also be used to create secret keys that are necessary for establishing secure wireless connections for wearable devices. For instance, instead of manually typing in a secret serial number or password for wirelessly pairing medical devices such as glucose or blood pressure monitors with smartphones, a smartphone could directly transmit arbitrary secret keys through the human body.

3.   A HBC system that transmits information directly through the body would create links immune to eavesdropping or man in the middle attacks. For example, by simply touching a doorknob, a user could transmit secret credentials from their smartphone through their body to open the door, without leaking secret information over the air.