Body coupled communication (BCC) is a hot topic in personal networking domain. Many works arepublished suggesting different architectures for BCC since its inception in 1995 by Zimmerman. The number ofelectronic gadgets used by a single person increases as time pass by. Its a tedious job to transfer data betweenthen from a user point of view. Many of these gadgets can share their resources and save power and money.The existing wired or wireless networks does not meet the requirements for this network like scalable data rate,security etc. So here comes the novel idea of using human body as communication medium. The aim of thisthesis is to realize a hardware for BCC based on wide band signaling as part of a big project.The human body consists of 70% of water. This property makes the human body a fairly good conductor.By exploiting this basic property makes the BCC possible. A capacitance is formed if we place a metal platenear to the human body with the skin as a dielectric. This capacitance forms the interface between the humanbody and the analog front-end of the BCC transceiver. Any other metal structures near to the human body canattenuate the signal.A first-order communication link is established in software by the human body model and the transceiver inthe loop along with noise and interference. This communication link is used to verify the human body modeland the base band model done as part of the same big project. Based on the results a hardware prototype isimplemented. Measurements are taken in different scenarios using the hardware setup. The trade-off betweendesign parameters are discussed based on the results. At the end, it suggests a road map to take the projectfurther.

Connected Me is a Human Body Communication (HBC) system, which is used fortransferring data through human body. The working principle is based on theorycalled Body Coupled Communication (BCC), which uses electrostatic couplingfor transferring data between device and human body. Capacitance between bodyand electrode acts as an electrical interface between devices. BCC has become aprominent research area in the field of Personal Area Network (PAN), introducedby Zimmerman in 1995. Until now there have been significant amount of paperspublished on human body models and Analog Front End (AFE), but only fewreports are available in digital baseband processing. The proposed Human Body Communication (HBC) system consists ofdigital baseband and AFE. Digital baseband is used for transferring data packets.AFE is designed for reconstructing signal shape after signal degradation causedby the human body. This thesis implements high speed serial digital communicationsystem for a human body channel. Available modulation schemes andcharacteristics of the Physical layer (PHY) with respect to human body channelare analyzed before implementing the system. The outcome of this thesis is aFPGA demonstrator that shows the possibility of communication through thehuman body. / Connected Me