Preface
The past decades have witnessed wide demand and applications for wireless communications in the human body area, that is, in the immediate environment around a human body. These demands and applications especially focus on wireless transmission and networking of personal information for user identification, healthcare and medical applications. Body area communication techniques make this more feasible. Compared with classical wireless communications, the human body acts as a communication medium either passively or favorably in body area communications. This is no doubt a kind of novelty in the context of classical wireless communications. As expected, the human body exhibits various different features from the typical wireless medium, that is, air, when it is used as a communication medium. Nowadays, more and more people are trying to uncover its intrinsic mystery so as to profit from the expected communication purposes.
As noticed by many researchers in this area, body area communications is an emerging technique which exhibits very good prospects not only in entertainment and user identification but also in healthcare and medical applications. The required knowledge ranges from wireless communications to bio-electromagnetics. In fact, we have been working in wireless communications for many years. The first author spent the first six years on completion of his doctoral work in developing wireless transceivers/systems for mobile communications and personal computer communications ...
