story from MIT Tech Review
“(…) Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are in the early stages of developing technology that uses your body as a communication medium, which they say could eventually work as a lower power, more secure alternative to Bluetooth for wearable gadgets like smart watches and fitness and health trackers.(…)
The researchers measured how much of the signal was lost from one body part to the next—arm to arm, or arm to head, for instance—and determined that it was as much as 10 million times less than what’s found with the use of Bluetooth. (…)
Mercier thinks the technology is more secure than Bluetooth, since it’s using the body to transfer information rather than sending it over the air, making it harder to intercept any communications between devices. And he says the strength of the magnetic field they’re generating is “orders of magnitude” lower than, say, an MRI.
The technology is still just in the early prototype phase; (…) they’re also planning to do some experiments through which they’ll transfer something like the data from a heart-rate monitor across this sort of link to a smartwatch.
However, Mercier suspects the technology won’t be as useful for gadgets that don’t wrap around the body—like smartphones or a sensor-containing patch you might stick on your body—because they won’t propagate the magnetic waves through the body in the same way.”