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While the number of wearables is steadily growing, the wearables/person wearing them faces a limitation due to the need for charging all of them every day. To unlock the true power of IoB, we need to make these IoB nodes perpetual. However, that is not possible with today’s technology. In this paper, we will debate, whether with the advent of Wi-R protocol that uses the body to communicate at 100X lower energy that BTLE/Wi-Fi, is it going to be possible to enable the long-standing desire of perpetual sensing/actuation nodes for the Internet of Bodies. 

Over six decades of semiconductor technology scaling (Moore's Law) and subsequently system size scaling (Bell's Law) has reduced the size of unit computing to virtually zero. This has led to computing becoming ubiquitous in everything around us, making everyday things smart. Similarly, tremendous progress in communication capacity (Shannon's theorem) has made these smart things connected to the internet and forming the Internet of Things (IoT). Many of these smart, connected devices are present in, on, or around the human body. This subset of IoT around the human body has a distinguishing feature, that it has a common medium, i.e. the body itself. This subset is increasingly becoming popular as the Internet of Bodies (IoB). In this paper, we look into the need and growth of IoB devices, including the technological landscape, current challenges and the future that IoB will enable for empowering humans. 

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. 

Recent advances in audio-visual augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) demands 1) high speed (>10Mbps) data transfer among wearable devices around the human body with 2) low transceiver (TRX) power consumption for longer lifetime, especially as communication energy/b is often orders of magnitude higher than computation energy/switching. While WiFi can transmit compressed video (HD 30fps, compressed @6-12Mbps), it consumes 50-to-400mW power. Bluetooth, on the other hand, is not designed for video transfer. New mm-Wave links can support the required bandwidth but do not support ultra-low-power (<1mW). In recent years, Human-Body Communication (HBC) [1]–[6] has emerged as a promising low-power alternative to traditional wireless communication. However, previous implementations of HBC transmitters (Tx) suffer from a large plate-to-plate capacitance (C p , between signal electrode and local ground of the transmitter) which results in a power consumption of aC p V2f (Fig. 16.6.1) in voltage-mode (VM) HBC. The recently proposed Resonant HBC [6] tries to overcome this problem by resonating C p with a parallel inductor (L). However, the operating frequency is usually < a few 10's of MHz for low-power Electro-Quasistatic (EQS) operation, resulting in a large/bulky inductor. Moreover, the resonant LC p circuit has a large settling time (≈5Q 2 RC P , where R is the effective series resistance of the inductor) for EQS frequencies which will limit the maximum symbol rate to <1MSps for a 21MHz carrier (the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for HBC), making resonant HBC infeasible for> 10Mb/s applications. 

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.