Digital Communications and Networking Commons^™

Skin-Mimo: Vibration-Based Mimo Communication Over Human Skin, Dong Ma, Yuezhong Wu, Ming Ding, Mahbub Hassan, Wen Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We explore the feasibility of Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) communication through vibrations over human skin. Using off-the-shelf motors and piezo transducers as vibration transmitters and receivers, respectively, we build a 2x2 MIMO testbed to collect and analyze vibration signals from real subjects. Our analysis reveals that there exist multiple independent vibration channels between a pair of transmitter and receiver, confirming the feasibility of MIMO. Unfortunately, the slow ramping of mechanical motors and rapidly changing skin channels make it impractical for conventional channel sounding based channel state information (CSI) acquisition, which is critical for achieving MIMO capacity gains. To solve this problem, we …