Performance Analysis of Galvanically Coupled HBC Channels for Implantable Extravascular Sensors

Extravascular sensors can provide hemodynamic data to aid in diagnosis and management of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). This prompts research into methods for communicating data to and from these implanted sensors. This paper proposes five (5) in-body communication paths that use galvanically coupled human body communications (HBC). These channel models are designed for finite-element method (FEM) simulations in Comsol Multiphysics 6.1. The resulting magnitude and phase responses were used to create a human body communication chain in Matlab R2024a. The communication chain comprises of the HBC physical (PHY) layer at the transmitter, a filter replicating the human body channel, a correlation decoder as well as supporting analog front-end circuitry. Afterwards, Monte Carlo analysis was applied to the transmission of frequency shift coded (FSC) signals across the channels to obtain their error characteristics. Bit error rates (BER) obtained for these channels varied between 10^−4 and 10^−5, indicating promising performance.