Wireless body area network and its healthcare applications

With a paradigm shift in advent of u-healthcare era, the wireless body area network (WBAN) has been recently emerged. In this paper, we overview the WBAN technology and summary its three types of physical layers (PHYs). Among three PHYs, we introduce the human body communication (HBC) which uses the human body as a communication channel to transmit the electric signal. Through the clear understanding of the body channel with T-shaped body channel model and theoretical channel analysis, we present 6 HBC transceiver implemented with CMOS technology, including a world-first WBAN transceiver satisfying all of the specifications for IEEE 802.15.6 standard. Through the implemented transceiver, we successfully demonstrate the MP3 player, and smart patch system for entertainment, and healthcare application, respectively.