IEEE Internet of Things Journal — Accepted Paper

Overview

The Internet of Medical Things enables continuous monitoring, remote management, and data-driven interventions using wearable and implantable medical devices. However, widespread reliance on short-range radio technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy exposes body area networks to eavesdropping, physiological data manipulation, and Denial-of-Service attacks, with direct implications for patient safety and privacy.

This survey examines Intra-Body Communication as an alternative communication paradigm that uses the human body as a transmission medium. It classifies major IBC modalities, surveys applications across implants, wearables, assistive systems, and the Internet of Bio-Nano Things, and relates IBC to attack surfaces observed in BLE-based systems.

The paper compares IBC and radio-frequency body area networks across security, reliability, throughput, and interference resilience. The synthesis shows that reported IBC links range from tens of kb/s to Mbps depending on the modality, with Fat-IBC reaching up to 92 Mb/s, while GC-IBC and CC/EQS-HBC offer stronger body-confined robustness and lower BER trends than BLE/SmartBAN.

The review positions IBC as an enabling technology for connected medical devices and identifies open challenges in validation, safety assessment, multi-node coordination, system integration, and standardisation.

Reported throughput and illustrative BER-versus-SNR comparison across BLE/SmartBAN and selected IBC modalities.

Resources

• Read the paper via DOI — the IEEE record will become accessible through this permanent link when online publication is complete.