Scalable 1Mb/s ETextile Body Area Network

An eTextiles body area network is designed across multiple layers for managing a group of biomedical sensors on a user's body. The sensors are powered remotely by a central base station that also manages data flow in both directions, using modulation schemes chosen to reduce communication effort at the energy-constrained sensors. Power and data are transferred across a magnetic near-field link formed by screen-printed inductors on fabric. Fabricated in 0.18µm CMOS, the base station consumes 2.9 mW power to connect to one sensor node consuming 34µW power and transmitting at 1 Mb/s. This results in an 8× increase in data rate and 6× increase in end-to-end power transfer efficiency than other solutions.