We communicate with our body all the time, but it may take on a very different meaning soon. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are in the early stages of developing technology that uses the body as a communication medium, which they say could eventually work as a lower power, more secure alternative to Bluetooth for wearable gadgets like smart watches and fitness and health trackers.
Through the body
Magnetic fields can easily pass through the body. So in hopes of coming up with a way for growing number of wearable gadgets to communicate, without using as much of their already-limited batteries, Mercier and graduate student Jiwoong Park have been working on technology that they think can make it possible to communicate more efficiently by sending magnetic signals through you.
Millions of times better
Researchers measured how much of the signal was lost from one body part to the next — arm to arm, arm to head, for instance — and determined that it was as much as 10 million times less than what’s found with the use of Bluetooth. This leads them to think it could be used to make wearable gadgets that use way less power for communication.
And more secure
Mercier thinks the technology is more secure than Bluetooth, since it’s using the body to transfer information rather than sending it over the air, making it harder to intercept any communications between the devices.
And he says the strength of the magnetic field they’re generating is “orders of magnitude” lower than, say, an MRI.
The technology is still just in the early prototype phase; Mercier says that while they have some “preliminary” prototypes that they’ve used to transfer brain activity data from a coil around the head to a coil around the wrist, and from there to a connected computer, it isn’t integrated into a wearable gadget yet.
He adds that they’re planning to do experiments through which they’ll transfer something like the data from a heart-rate monitor across this sort of link to a smartwatch.
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