You Can Now Communicate Wirelessly Using Your Body’s Magnetic Fields — Are you ready?
A new path for wireless communication has been paved after a group of electrical engineers developed and demonstrated a new proof-of-concept that uses ultra-low power wearable technology for transmission of data using your body’s natural magnetic field to communicate between devices, and the data can easily be passed through our natural tissues.
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The prototype has been designed by the electrical engineers of the University of California, San Diego that sends and receives signals wirelessly through body by winding insulated copper wires around three body parts, and those wires are capable of generating magnetic field. Making it a new wearable wireless communication technology.
If you compare this with other wireless communication technologies, like Bluetooth technology, this one is much more secure from the snooping eyes of the security individuals and because it is ultra-low powered wearable, so it uses less amount of battery power to operate.
However, the technology is still under development phases but according to the engineers and developers, this technology is much greater than that of Bluetooth radio-based communications and said that,
“The path losses associated with magnetic field human body communication are upwards of 10 million times lower than those associated with Bluetooth radios.”
For the construction of this concept, engineering students make use of copper wires that are further insulated with PVC tubes. At one end of the prototype, the wires are connected to an external analyser. And at the other end, the wires are winded around three areas of the body such as legs, arms and head.
These coiled or winded wires serve as a source for magnetic field and enable communication of magnetic signals from one part of the body to another, and uses the body as a guidance. This is what enabled researchers to demonstrate and measure the loss of communication from arm to arm, from arm to the head, and from arm to leg.
Patrick Mercier, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego said,
“This technique, to our knowledge, achieves the lowest path losses out of any wireless human body communication system that’s been demonstrated so far. This technique will allow us to build much lower power wearable devices.”
Apart from its ultra-low power consumption, the core advantage of this new communication technology is the increased amount of security as compared to the Bluetooth technology. The reason is that the Bluetooth is potentially vulnerable to eavesdropping because anyone standing within the 30 feet can intercept the data. Whereas on the other hand, this magnetic wearable communication system uses the human body as a source of combination, which makes it less vulnerable to spying.
According to the researchers, this wearable technique has a greater amount of signal on the body but the signals decrease “dramatically” off the body. So in a nutshell, on this wearable communication technology, data and information will not be transmitted from one person to another and neither it will be able to radiate off the body. This makes it safer and securer than other wireless mediums.
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UC San Diego.
