Combining capacitive coupling with conductive clothes: towards resource-efficient wearable communication

Traditional intra-body communication approaches mostly rely on either fixed cable joints embedded in clothing, or on wireless radio transmission that tends to reach beyond the body. Situated between these approaches is body-coupled communication, a promising yet less-explored method that transmits information across the user's skin. We propose a novel body-coupled communication approach that simplifies the physical layer of data transmission via capacitive coupling between wearable systems with conductive fabrics: This layer provides a stable reference potential for the feedback path in proximity to the attached wearables on the human body, to cancel the erratic dependency on the environmental ground, and to increase the communications' reliability. Evaluation of our prototype shows significant increases in signal quality, due to reduced attenuation and noise. Requirements on hardware and, subsequently, energy consumption, cost, and implementation effort are reduced as well.