Optocoupler Effect on In-Vivo Measurements Characterization for Human Body Communication

Body Area Network (BAN) has found intuitive applications in healthcare and medical monitoring, where interconnected electronic terminals are used around a user. In this contest, Human Body Communication (HBC) is a promising technique which uses the human body as a communication medium. Almost measures targeting the HBC channel characterization, the balun has been used to separate the grounds between transceivers. In this work, optocoupler was used for the first time, to decouple transceiver ports from each other and prevent the parasitic return path. Optocoupler's effect on the measured results was analyzed for both capacitive and galvanic HBC coupling.