Guiding ultrasonic waves across blood vessels to support intra-body networking.

Intra Body Area Networks (IBANs) will allow revolutionary applications in the field of smart and connected healthcare systems. So far, research has focused on networking between implanted devices via conventional ionizing RF waves which have not yet been proved to be safe for human health. In the last years, novel networking approaches employing ultrasonic waves have been proposed showing that, in principle, the approach is viable. However, the major limitation of the proposed solutions is related to the limited transmission range. Starting from this, we propose to use blood vessels as a waveguided ultrasonic transmission medium and demonstrate its effectiveness in making IBANs more performing in terms of communication distance, as compared to diffusive ultrasonic communications across human tissues.