C-IoB

Center for Internet of Bodies

The center's research is organized into the following themes:

Body Sensors & Actuators

  • Biomedical & Neural Sensors (Electrodes/MEMS)
  • Compressed and Multi-modal IoB Sensing
  • Neural Stimulators, Electronic, Acoustic Actuators
  • Energy Harvesting and Innovative Powering

Body Communication

  • Wearable and Implantable Body Comm
  • Co-Design of Sensing & Communication
  • Multi-Sensor On-body Network Architectures
  • Multi-Human Networks

Body Electromagnetics

  • Electromagnetics-Biomatter Interaction for Sensing, Communication & Actuation
  • EM Wave Biosensors Design & Physics
  • On-Body Antenna Design & Simulations
  • On-Body Acoustics Design & Physics
  • SAR & Safety Studies

On-Body Intelligence

  • In-Sensor, On-Hub Analytics, Edge Intelligence
  • Distributed Intelligence (Node/Edge/Cloud)
  • Predictive Intelligence (Linear/Model Predictors)
  • Latency & Energy Co-Optimization

IoB Security

  • Medical Device Security
  • Physical/Hardware Security for IoB
  • Latency & Energy Sensitive Encryptions
  • Privacy-Preserving Processing on IoB Data
  • Privacy Policies & Ethical Concerns

Brain & Body In-Vivo Devices

  • Human and Animal In-Vivo Experiments
  • Medical-Grade Designs through Collaboration with Doctors
  • Brain-Machine Interfaces
  • Devices for Neuroscience
Disclaimer: The following are initial placeholders as examples. This page will be updated soon with recent updates from C-IoB group.
Our work will focus on borrowing and developing a range of on-body and implanted sensors and actuators to serve specific medical needs, consumer applications and, most importantly, showcase our proposed IoB platform. Specificities of these sensors and actuators include medical-grade designs, high levels of user experience, and compatibility with on-body and implanted communication technologies of IoB.
Our work will focus on advancing communication and network technologies to optimize power consumption, latency, bandwidth, and reliability for energy-constrained healthcare sensing nodes and multimedia devices that demand higher bandwidth and low latencies. Towards this, we aim to study several radiative technologies such as BLE, WiFi, Visual Light Communication, LoRa, and non-radiative technologies such as energy-efficient EQS-HBC that use the body as the communication channel. Our study will focus on the applicability of these communication technologies for specific IoB use cases, the interoperability of these communication technologies, their channel models, interference patterns, and their impact on healthcare and multimedia applications. We also intend to develop, characterize and standardize IoB network architectures and network routing strategies for several IoB use cases of differing latency, bandwidth, and reliability requirements.
Human-Computer Interaction, Strictly through Touch

BodyWire-HCI: Enabling New Interaction Modalities by Communicating Strictly During Touch Using Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication

BodyWire-HCI, which utilizes the human body as a wire-like communication channel, enables a novel human–computer interaction, that for the first time, demonstrates selective and physically secure communication strictly during touch.

Maity et al., TOCHI 2021

Energy-Efficient HBC Transceivers + Power Transfer

IC1: BodyWire (first sub-10pJ/b HBC Transceiver), IC2: Sub-μWRComm (first Sub-μW HBC Transceiver), and IC3: EQS Res-HBC (first whole-body powering + resonant comm. SoC)

Continuous Advancements in HBC Transceivers (TRX), resulting in the first sub-10pJ/b HBC TRX (BodyWire: IC1), the first Sub-μW HBC TRX (Sub-μWRComm: IC2) and the first whole-body powering + resonant TRX SoC (EQS Res-HBC: IC3).

Maity et al., JSSC 2019; Maity et al., JSSC 2021; Modak et al., CICC 2021;

Our work will investigate the body's electromagnetic properties and its behavior in the presence of electromagnetic waves of different frequencies and strengths. The purpose of this investigation is twofold. First, we intend to develop novel biosensors that use electromagnetic waves for the non-invasive diagnosis of medical conditions. Second, we intend to understand the electromagnetic signal propagation characteristics of the body to improve the performance of on-body and implanted communication technologies and devices.
Study of EM Safety in Human Body Communication

On the Safety of Human Body Communication

This work analyzes the compliance of the current density and electric/magnetic fields generated in different modalities of HBC with the established safety standards.

Shovan Maity et al. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2020

Inter-body Coupling in Human Body Communication

Inter-body coupling in electro-quasistatic human body communication: theory and analysis of security and interference properties

This work studies the function of the human body as a capacitor and its implication in security and interference in EQS-HBC communication. Design strategies are explored to minimize the effect of inter-body coupling.

Mayukh Nath et al. Nature Scientific Reports, 2021

Sensor nodes in IoB are typically energy-constrained. Running analytics in these nodes allows them to compress data or determine if the data they collect is necessary to be transmitted or not. The use of analytics can thus save communication power, which is often the significant factor contributing to a node's energy expenditure. Similarly, edge intelligence, which performs computationally intensive processing of data from the nodes in a more resourceful host at the network edge, can minimize security risks through encryption, minimize transmission bandwidth through compression, and reduce latency to act on the data through local monitoring and control. Towards the use of analytics and edge intelligence in IoB, our research aims to design algorithms for these components targeting several use cases, explore the placement possibilities for these components in complex networks, and design hardware platforms and tools to host them and evaluate their performances.
Ultra-low-power IoT Sensor Network with ISA+CI+CAS

Collaborative Intelligence (CI) With Spatio-Temporal In-Sensor-Analytics (ISA) and Context-Aware Switching (CAS) for Efficient Communication in a Large-Area IoT Testbed

Since communication energy/bit is often over three orders of magnitude compared to computing, pushing intelligence towards the leaf node reduces communication data volume, improving energy/information (500x). Both Spatial and Temporal In-Sensor Analytics is explored.

Chatterjee et al., IoT-J 2021

Self-Optimizing Comp-Comm SoC

A 65nm Image Processing SoC Supporting Multiple DNN Models and Real-Time Computation-Communication Trade-Off Via Actor-Critical Neuro-Controller

Communication energy depends on the dynamic channel whereas in-sensor computing energy depends on the quality of the sensed data. For the first time a custom SoC with dynamic co-optimization between computation and communication to maintain the IoB node at its minimum energy per information point.

Cao et al. Symposium on VLSI Circuits, 2020

At present, IoB devices like IoT devices are easily hackable. However, unlike IoT devices, IoB handles data personal to individuals such as the data concerning the individuals health condition, and thus the security and privacy are paramount. Our work in this space will focus on developing and exploring different physical/hardware level security measures, encryption algorithms, hand-shaking protocols, and privacy policies that can run on the resource-constrained IoB nodes to keep the network secure and private.
Local EM Leakage Signature Protection

EM and Power SCA-resilient AES-256 through >350x Current Domain Signature Attenuation & Local Lower Metal Routing

Resource and energy constrained IoB nodes can be attacked using physical (e.g., power and electromagnetic) side channels. This work builds in circuit level physical layer security to improve the resiliency to such attack by over 100x.

Das et al. IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits (JSSC), 2021

IoT Security Enhancement/Augmentation using RF-PUF

RF-PUF: Enhancing IoT Security Through Authentication of Wireless Nodes Using In-Situ Machine Learning

In asymmetric IoB networks, the resource constrained leaf nodes can benefit from enhanced physical security by using the electromagnetic signature automatically imprinted during communication as a fingerprint through machine learning inferences on the hub node. This work builds on the first radio frequency PUF proposed by Purdue.

Chatterjee et al., IoT-J 2019

Unlike devices in IoT, devices in IOB, particularly those targeting healthcare applications, are expected to reside on the surface of the human body or be implanted (e.g., in the brain). Such devices need to conform to medical-grade standards and be less cumbersome for the subjects to carry around for extended periods. Specific to implantable devices, since they are in constant contact with bodily fluids, they need to be waterproof to protect internal electronics from shorts and corrosion. Further, the materials used for packaging these devices should avoid chemical reactions with bodily fluids that can adversely affect health but, at the same time, ensure good channel conditions for communication signals. Further, since replacing batteries in IoB devices can hinder continuous monitoring of health data, IoB devices should have extended life or run on alternate energy sources. Towards these goals, our research aims to develop know-how and tools to accelerate the realization of hardware, firmware, and packaging of IoB devices, with a particular focus on medical-grade conformality, user experience, energy-optimization, and battery-free energy harvesting possibilities.
Bi-Phasic Quasi-Static Brain Communication (BP-QBC)

A 1.15μW 5.54mm3 Implant with a Bidirectional Neural Sensor and Stimulator SoC utilizing Bi-Phasic Quasi-static Brain Communication achieving 6kbps-10Mbps Uplink with Compressive Sensing and RO-PUF based Collision Avoidance

For the first time a custom SoC is shown with BP-QBC, showing a 0.52μW at 10Mbps, and with >20dB better end-to-end path loss as compared to the state-of-the-art.

Electro-Quasistatic Animal Body Communication

Electro‑Quasistatic Animal Body Communication for Untethered Rodent Biopotential Recording

This work brings the recent advancements of human body communication to animal neuroscience to improve chronic recording times by reducing wireless communication power by an order of magnitude.

Sriram et al. Nature Scientific Reports, 2021

IBOB Channel Modeling for Precision Animal Agriculture

In-body to Out-of-body Communication Channel Modeling for Ruminant Animals for Smart Animal Agriculture

Communication channel model characterization for bovines using novel in-vivo experimental and FEM based simulation techniques at 400 MHz for data transfer from sensors inside rumen outside the body to enable smart animal agriculture.

Datta et al. Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2021

Featured Projects

Human-Computer Interaction, Strictly through Touch

BodyWire-HCI: Enabling New Interaction Modalities by Communicating Strictly During Touch Using Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication

BodyWire-HCI, which utilizes the human body as a wire-like communication channel, enables a novel human–computer interaction, that for the first time, demonstrates selective and physically secure communication strictly during touch.

Maity et al., TOCHI 2021

Bi-Phasic Quasi-Static Brain Communication (BP-QBC)

A 1.15μW 5.54mm3 Implant with a Bidirectional Neural Sensor and Stimulator SoC utilizing Bi-Phasic Quasi-static Brain Communication achieving 6kbps-10Mbps Uplink with Compressive Sensing and RO-PUF based Collision Avoidance

For the first time a custom SoC is shown with BP-QBC, showing a 0.52μW at 10Mbps, and with >20dB better end-to-end path loss as compared to the state-of-the-art.

Energy-Efficient HBC Transceivers + Power Transfer

IC1: BodyWire (first sub-10pJ/b HBC Transceiver), IC2: Sub-μWRComm (first Sub-μW HBC Transceiver), and IC3: EQS Res-HBC (first whole-body powering + resonant comm. SoC)

Continuous Advancements in HBC Transceivers (TRX), resulting in the first sub-10pJ/b HBC TRX (BodyWire: IC1), the first Sub-μW HBC TRX (Sub-μWRComm: IC2) and the first whole-body powering + resonant TRX SoC (EQS Res-HBC: IC3).

Maity et al., JSSC 2019; Maity et al., JSSC 2021; Modak et al., CICC 2021;

Local EM Leakage Signature Protection

EM and Power SCA-resilient AES-256 through >350x Current Domain Signature Attenuation & Local Lower Metal Routing

Resource and energy constrained IoB nodes can be attacked using physical (e.g., power and electromagnetic) side channels. This work builds in circuit level physical layer security to improve the resiliency to such attack by over 100x.

Das et al. IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits (JSSC), 2021

Disclaimer: The following are initial placeholders as examples. This page will be updated soon with recent updates from C-IoB group.
Disclaimer: The following are initial placeholders as examples. This page will be updated soon with recent updates from C-IoB group.
Maximizing Energy/Information
In most sensor nodes in use today, the communication energy is 10000 times higher than the computation energy. For battery-powered devices, this calls for the need to communicate "information" rather than raw sensor data to extend the device's battery life. Coding raw data to information helps prune the number of bits to communicate, saving the overall energy consumption of the device at the expense of higher computation energy. Our work will explore optimal strategies to extract information from raw sensor data to optimize energy consumption per unit of information rather than optimize the communication energy per bit as is done traditionally.
Disclaimer: The following are initial placeholders as examples. This page will be updated soon with recent updates from C-IoB group.

S. Sen, S. Maity and D. Das, "The body is the network: To safeguard sensitive data, turn flesh and tissue into a secure wireless channel," in IEEE Spectrum, vol. 57, no. 12, pp. 44-49, Dec. 2020, doi: 10.1109/MSPEC.2020.9271808.

D. Das, S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, and S. Sen, "Enabling Covert Body Area Network using Electro-Quasistatic Human Body Communication," in Scientific Reports (Nature)- Feb 2019

S. Maity, N. Modak, D. Yang, S. Avlani, M. Nath, J. Danial, D. Das, P. Mehrotra, S. Sen, "Sub-μWRComm: 415-nW 1–10-kb/s Physically and Mathematically Secure Electro-Quasi-Static HBC Node for Authentication and Medical Applications," in IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 2021

D. Das , J. Danial, A. Golder, N. Modak, S. Maity, B. Chatterjee, D. Seo, M. Chang, A. Varna, H. Krishnamurthy, S. Mathew, S. Ghosh, A. Raychowdhury, S. Sen, "EM and Power SCA-resilient AES-256 in 65nm CMOS through >350x Current Domain Signature Attenuation," in IEEE International Solid- State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2020)

S. Sriram, S. Avlani, M. P. Ward, and S. Sen, "Electro-Quasistatic Animal Body Communication for Chronic Untethered Rodent Biopotential Recording". in Scientific Reports(Nature), 2021