Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

New Bluetooth alternative sends its signal using your body’s magnetic field

By

magnetic body communication bluetooth ucsd
UC San Diego
Ultra-low power wearable technology is about to get very interesting thanks to a new wireless transmission system that uses your body’s natural magnetic waves to carry a data signal across devices. The technology is being developed by a team of researchers from the University of California at San Diego, who have built a proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate this form of wireless transmission.

UC San Diego’s magnetic field human body communication system has several advantages over Bluetooth, the most common wireless transmission protocol used to share data over short distances. Bluetooth suffers from path loss, which is a term to describe the attenuation of a wireless signal as it passes through the air and encounters objects that absorb or obstruct its transmission. As a result, Bluetooth devices must have a significant power output capable of sending a signal that can compensate for this degradation.

Recommended Videos

RELATED: In 3 years, all your smart-home gadgets may speak Bluetooth

Related

UCSD’s magnetic body communication overcomes this limitation by using the body’s magnetic field as a transmission medium, allowing signals to flow from one part of the body to another with minimal loss in strength. The team estimates the path loss from its wireless transmission system is 10 million times lower than that of Bluetooth. Because the signals can travel without little to no power loss, the wireless devices only needs minimal power to produce a signal. These energy savings would translate into significantly longer battery life for wearable and portable devices that use this new body-based communications.

“A problem with wearable devices like smart watches is that they have short operating times because they are limited to using small batteries,” said UCSD electrical engineering Ph.D student Jiwoong Park in a related statement. “With this magnetic field human body communication system, we hope to significantly reduce power consumption as well as how frequently users need to recharge their devices.”

Besides power savings, UCSD’s magnetic system also offers improved security when compared to Bluetooth, which radiates its signal to all devices within a 30-foot radius. Theoretically, anyone within that area can detect the Bluetooth signal and attempt to intercept the data being sent over the connection. Interception is much more difficult in a wireless system that uses the body to send its signal. A hacker would need to attach a snooping device directly on the user’s body to hijack that signal.

UCSD’s magnetic field human body communication system is still in the early stages of its development, but the technology shows promise as an ultra low power system for wearable devices. Besides the obvious application in smartwatches and fitness trackers, the team envisions a broader use of the technology. For example, this magnetic transmission would be ideal for a full-body monitoring system that gathers data from wireless sensors attached to different parts of the body.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly Hodgkins
Contributor
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more
4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon
Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.

Read more