ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF BODY-COUPLED POWERING TX FOR BODY AREA NETWORK APPLICATIONS

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things, wearable sensing networks are increasingly expected to be of use in a range of applications, including fitness tracking, health monitoring, remote diagnostics, etc. The wearable devices used to build such networks are heterogeneous and generally need to be placed on specific body locations to deliver the intended functionality, which poses a challenge in circuit and system designs of providing a stable power solution. Therefore, the capacitive body-coupled powering with de-Q impedance booster and interface impedance matching technique, is proposed and demonstrated to sustain all wearable devices around human body with full body area coverage. To improve the power recovery and system efficiency, the proposed dynamic conjugate impedance matching method significantly suppresses reflection loss caused by interface impedance mismatch. In addition, node-specific channel and power condition awareness are adopted to the power TX to enhance the power utilization and prolong the battery life.