Redtacton Case

Human Area Networking (HAN) is a technology that safely turns the surface of the human body into a data transmission path at speeds up to 10 Mbps between any two points on the body.

1.1 History of HAN

* The concept of intra-body communication was first proposed by IBM in 1996.

* This communication mechanism was later evaluated and reported by several research groups around the world.

All those reported technologies had two limitations.

1. The operating range through the body was limited to a few tens of centimeters.

2. The top communication speed was only 40 bit/s!!

These limitations were overcome by NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) located in Tokyo, Japan by using photonic electric field sensors and finally came up with a human area networking technology called 'REDTACTON'.

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1.2 Overview of RedTacton

* RedTacton is a new Human Area Networking technology that turns the surface of the human body as a safe, high speed network transmission path.

* Communication is possible using any body surfaces, such as the hands, fingers, arms, feet, face, legs or toes.

* RedTacton works through shoes and clothing as well.

* RedTacton uses the minute electric field emitted on the surface of the human body for data transmission.

NTT developed super sensitive Photonic electric field sensor for detecting minute electric field emitted on the surface of the human body.

The electro-optic sensor has three key features:

 It can measure electric fields from a device under test (DUT) without contacting it, which minimizes measurement disturbance.

 Ultra wide-band measurement is possible.

 It supports one-point contact measurement that is independent of the ground,

which is the most significant feature in the present context.

NTT utilized this third feature to fabricate an intra-body communication receiver for its human area networking technology, which is called RedTacton.

At the end of 2002 the Japanese telecommunications group NTT had announced that it would develop a new data transmission technology that uses the conductive properties of the human body to exchange information between electronic devices. With RedTacton the company has now scarcely