the possibly accurate nowThu, 29 Dec 2005
[09:06] Human Area Networks
I didn't see the HAN mentioned in the CCNA study guide anywhere but they appear to be a burgeoning technology, well according to the folks over at RedTacton anyway.
According to them - they being the NTT - they've created a device that utilises the weak electric field that is generated by all living humans to faciliatate data transfer. The website alleges "duplex communication over the human body at a maximum speed of 10 Mbps" (about 1.25 Megabytes per second), they mention "duplex" as opposed to full duplex but this figure is reduced to half-duplex in the FAQ. The bulk of the pertinent information can be found on the:
Essentially, you have a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter somehow influences the electric field on your body and the receiver then picks up these changes by shooting a laser through an "electro-optic crystal" (which I am assuming is a crystal whose optical properties change in relation to its proximity to an electrical field or something).
The obvious comms comparison here is to Bluetooth, but the current maximum data transfer rate of 2.1Mbps for Bluetooth
EDR is well below the alleged 10Mbps (or even 5Mbps depending on which bit of the website is telling the truth about the full data transfer rate) of RedTacton, although the transmission distance (10 centimeters or less) is considerably lower. I guess it is also analogous to
RFID in some ways.
A couple of things I'm wondering about this:
- Is the electric field generated by a person capable of being used as a unique identifier? That would make for some interesting "embedded" authentication devices.
- Can these things be human powered or are they going to require batteries? The FAQ says the transceiver requires "several hundred milli-watts". We aren't there yet but people are working on human powered batteries.
Bring on the
wetware!
category:
/tech |
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