Design of a floating-ground-electrode circuit for measuring attenuation of the human body channel

Abstract

BACKGROUND:

Recently, health care and disease prevention are more and more important in people’s daily life. Human body communication (HBC) is an emerging short distance wireless communication mode, which is quite suitable for the communication between the wearable human health care equipment. However, most research on HBC mainly focuses on the electromagnetic model and the circuit model of equivalent human and the in vivo experiment is based on the commercial equipment.

OBJECTIVE:

The aim of this paper is to design a circuit device for measuring the attenuation of the human body channel based on a floating-ground-electrode method.

METHODS:

This paper proposed a new floating-ground-electrode method so as to solve problems of power and high frequencies interference and impedance matching. A circuit module, including signal generator, analog frontend circuit and MCU, was designed to initially replace the spectrum analyzer to measure the attenuation of the human body channel. The floating-ground-electrode added to the receiving end of the human body channel was connected to the ground of the analog frontend circuit, forming an equal potential circuit. The three-electrodes of the receiving terminal can act as a differential probe, since one electrode is connected to the ground and the other two electrodes achieved signal input and output respectively.

RESULTS:

The results showed that the experimental data of channel attenuation were similar to the measured value of the spectrum analyzer. The maximum absolute error was 1.148 dB and the relative error was 3.55%. In addition, different sizes of the floating-ground-electrode cannot affect the attenuation path of human body channels. Moreover, the common mode rejection ratio (CMRR) was approximated to the value of the commercial differential probe.

CONCLUSION:

This paper proposed a new floating-ground-electrode method for measuring the attenuation of the human body channel. It could provide the possibility for the dynamic measurement of attenuation and take the place of the spectrum analyzer and make the process of experiments simple and efficient.