OpenIBC: Open-Source Wake-Up Receiver for Capacitive Intra-Body Communication.

Intra-Body Communication (IBC) uses the human body as a part of the physical transmission channel for a more efficient and secure on-body communication. Since its introduction in 1995, it has evolved into an alternative to traditional wired and wireless techniques, and was eventually included as human body communication (HBC) in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for wireless body area networks (WBAN). In contrast to the ubiquitous radio-frequency identification (RFID) and near-field communication (NFC), IBC has, however, not reached the market yet, and possible applications remain underinvestigated. We present the OpenIBC project and a first open-source IBC receiver that is based on a repurposed off-the-shelf low-power RFID wake-up receiver front-end. In the evaluation, the prototype achieved a data rate of 4096 bit/s with a packet error rate of 320.0 × 10 −6 at a low power of 7.4 µW in listening mode and 8.4 µW when receiving data. The design files and software are made available to encourage researchers to replicate and improve on our work, and to explore potential applications that benefit from IBC.