The potential of the Internet of Body (IoB) to support healthcare systems in the future lies in its ability to enable proactive wellness screening through the early detection and prevention of diseases. One promising technology for facilitating IoB applications is near-field inter-body coupling communication (NF-IBCC), which features lower power consumption and higher data security when compared to conventional radio frequency (RF) communication. However, designing efficient transceivers requires a profound understanding of the channel characteristics of NF-IBCC, which remain unclear due to significant differences in the magnitude and passband characteristics of existing research. In response to this problem, this paper clarifies the physical mechanisms of the differences in the magnitude and passband characteristics of NF-IBCC channel characteristics in existing research work through the core parameters that determine the gain of the NF-IBCC system. The core parameters of NF-IBCC are extracted through the combination of transfer functions, finite element simulations, and physical experiments. The core parameters include the inter-body coupling capacitance (CH), the load impedance (ZL), and the capacitance (Cair), coupled by two floating transceiver grounds. The results illustrate that CH, and particularly Cair, primarily determine the gain magnitude. Moreover, ZL mainly determines the passband characteristics of the NF-IBCC system gain. Based on these findings, we propose a simplified equivalent circuit model containing only core parameters, which can accurately capture the gain characteristics of the NF-IBCC system and help to concisely describe the channel characteristics of the system. This work lays a theoretical foundation for developing efficient and reliable NF-IBCC systems that can support IoB for early disease detection and prevention in healthcare applications. The potential benefits of IoB and NF-IBCC technology can, thus, be fully realized by developing optimized transceiver designs based on a comprehensive understanding of the channel characteristics.
Keywords: channel characteristics; channel model; near-field inter-body coupling communication.