skip to main content


Title: Sub-GHz In-Body to Out-of-Body Communication Channel Modeling for Ruminant Animals for Smart Animal Agriculture
Sensors in and around the environment becoming ubiquitous has ushered in the concept of smart animal agriculture which has the potential to greatly improve animal health and productivity using the concepts of remote health monitoring which is a necessity in times when there is a great demand for animal products. The data from in and around animals gathered from sensors dwelling in animal agriculture settings have made farms a part of the Internet of Things space. This has led to active research in developing efficient communication methodologies for farm networks. This study focuses on the first hop of any such farm network where the data from inside the body of the animals is to be communicated to a node dwelling outside the body of the animal. In this paper, we use novel experimental methods to calculate the channel loss of signal at sub-GHz frequencies of 100 - 900 MHz to characterize the in-body to out-of-body communication channel in large animals. A first-of-its-kind 3D bovine modeling is done with computer vision techniques for detailed morphological features of the animal body is used to perform Finite Element Method based Electromagnetic simulations. The results of the simulations are experimentally validated to come up with a complete channel modeling methodology for in-body to out-of-body animal body communication. The experimentally validated 3D bovine model is made available publicly on https://github.com/SparcLab/Bovine-FEM-Model.git GitHub. The results illustrate that an in-body to out-of-body communication channel is realizable from the rumen to the collar of ruminants with $\leq {90}~{\rm dB}$ path loss at sub-GHz frequencies ( $100-900~MHz$ ) making communication feasible. The developed methodology has been illustrated for ruminants but can also be used for other related in-body to out-of-body studies. Using the developed channel modeling technique, an efficient communication architecture can be formed for in-body to out-of-body communication in animals which paves the way for the design and development of future smart animal agriculture systems.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1944602
NSF-PAR ID:
10396167
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
ISSN:
0018-9294
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 10
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Continuous real-time health monitoring in animals is essential for ensuring animal welfare. In ruminants like cows, rumen health is closely intertwined with overall animal health. Therefore, in-situ monitoring of rumen health is critical. However, this demands in-body to out-of-body communication of sensor data. In this paper, we devise a method of channel modeling for a cow using experiments and FEM based simulations at 400 MHz. This technique can be further employed across all frequencies to characterize the communication channel for the development of a channel architecture that efficiently exploits its properties. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    Communication during touch provides a seamless and natural way of interaction between humans and ambient intelligence. Current techniques that couple wireless transmission with touch detection suffer from the problem of selectivity and security, i.e., they cannot ensure communication only through direct touch and not through close proximity. We present  BodyWire-HCI , which utilizes the human body as a wire-like communication channel, to enable human–computer interaction, that for the first time, demonstrates selective and physically secure communication strictly during touch. The signal leakage out of the body is minimized by utilizing a novel, low frequency Electro-QuasiStatic Human Body Communication (EQS-HBC) technique that enables interaction strictly when there is a conductive communication path between the transmitter and receiver through the human body. Design techniques such as capacitive termination and voltage mode operation are used to minimize the human body channel loss to operate at low frequencies and enable EQS-HBC. The demonstrations highlight the impact of  BodyWire-HCI in enabling new human–machine interaction modalities for variety of application scenarios such as secure authentication (e.g., opening a door and pairing a smart device) and information exchange (e.g., payment, image, medical data, and personal profile transfer) through touch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwrig2XQIH8). 
    more » « less
  3. Born out of long-term fieldwork in New York's Hudson Valley, this article begins and ends with reflections on a fraught attempt to conduct ethnographic research with captive chickens, paradoxically called Freedom Rangers™, living on small-scale, organic animal farms. With no available ecological and economic justifications for their confinement, I had to turn instead to animal agriculture's long-standing role in a regional landscape tradition that generates a White sense of place and personhood. Since the dawn of the colonial period, agriculture, especially animal agriculture, has constituted a powerful landscape-making assemblage in the Hudson Valley, one both deeply dependent on racial slavery and uniquely responsible for (never complete) Native displacement. Imported European farm animals and their associate organisms remade the region ecologically, enabling the proliferation of colonial settlement. Then as now, the remaking of the land is itself a site of politics and a means of realizing possible futures. Watching as Whiteness emerges along the human/nonhuman interface, I argue that meat is but one product yielded from these confined chicken bodies and that the unspectacular terror they experience on a daily basis radiates far beyond their enclosures. Addressing the persistence of settler colonialism, antiblackness, and White supremacy requires attention to a wider range of political scenes and actors than are often considered in studies of these formations. What are the banal practices and everyday affects that secure a social order? What are the possibilities for more-than-human ethnography given the violence that saturates this venerated landscape?

     
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    Wearable sensors are a topic of interest in medical healthcare monitoring due to their compact size and portability. However, providing power to the wearable sensors for continuous health monitoring applications is a great challenge. As the batteries are bulky and require frequent charging, the integration of the wireless power transfer (WPT) module into wearable and implantable sensors is a popular alternative. The flexible sensors benefit by being wirelessly powered, as it not only expands an individual’s range of motion, but also reduces the overall size and the energy needs. This paper presents the design, modeling, and experimental characterization of flexible square-shaped spiral coils with different scaling factors for WPT systems. The effects of coil scaling factor on inductance, capacitance, resistance, and the quality factor (Q-factor) are modeled, simulated, and experimentally validated for the case of flexible planar coils. The proposed analytical modeling is helpful to estimate the coil parameters without using the time-consuming Finite Element Method (FEM) simulation. The analytical modeling is presented in terms of the scaling factor to find the best-optimized coil dimensions with the maximum Q-factor. This paper also presents the effect of skin contact with the flexible coil in terms of the power transfer efficiency (PTE) to validate the suitability as a wearable sensor. The measurement results at 405 MHz show that when in contact with the skin, the 20 mm× 20 mm receiver (RX) coil achieves a 42% efficiency through the air media for a 10 mm distance between the transmitter (TX) and RX coils. 
    more » « less
  5. We present Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array S - (2–4 GHz), C - (4–8 GHz), and X -band (8–12 GHz) continuum observations toward seven radio-loud quasars at z  > 5. This sample has previously been found to exhibit spectral peaks at observed-frame frequencies above ∼1 GHz. We also present upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) band-2 (200 MHz), band-3 (400 MHz), and band-4 (650 MHz) radio continuum observations toward eight radio-loud quasars at z  > 5, selected from our previous GMRT survey, in order to sample their low-frequency synchrotron emission. Combined with archival radio continuum observations, all ten targets show evidence for spectral turnover. The turnover frequencies are ∼1–50 GHz in the rest frame, making these targets gigahertz-peaked-spectrum or high-frequency-peaker candidates. For the nine well-constrained targets with observations on both sides of the spectral turnover, we fit the entire radio spectrum with absorption models associated with synchrotron self-absorption and free-free absorption (FFA). Our results show that FFA in an external inhomogeneous medium can accurately describe the observed spectra for all nine targets, which may indicate an FFA origin for the radio spectral turnover in our sample. As for the complex spectrum of J114657.79+403708.6 at z  = 5.00 with two spectral peaks, it may be caused by multiple components (i.e., core-jet) and FFA by the high-density medium in the nuclear region. However, we cannot rule out the spectral turnover origin of variability. Based on our radio spectral modeling, we calculate the radio loudness R 2500 Å for our sample, which ranges from 12 −1 +1 to 674 −51 +61 . 
    more » « less