Personal Area Networks (cont.)

Personal area networks. How did they come in existence?

"The fascinating thing about any technical innovation is the way one idea grows out of another in an unexpected way" [Tom Zimmerman]

The development of the Personal Area Network (PAN) grew out of a meeting between Professor Mike Hawley's Personal Information Architecture Group and Professor Neil Gershenfeld's Physics and Media Group, both at the MIT Media Laboratory. Professor Hawley's group needed a means to interconnect body-borne information appliances, [1] and Professor Gershenfeld's group had been applying electric field sensing to position measurement. A hand placed between the antennas also affected the capacitance, interfering with the position measurement. This interference caused by a hand proved useful. They realized that, by modulation, the electric field being used for position-sensing data could be sent through a body.

A Clarification !

At this point, before going any further, I would like to clarify one thing. Personal area networks (PAN) actually refer to using a near field electric field to send data across various devices using the body as a medium. Personal area networks should not be confused with networks formed using Bluetooth technology. Bluetooth is a far field radio technology enabling communication between devices in the ISM band. Unfortunately, you now see Bluetooth and PAN being used interchangeably in many technical articles, which is not correct. Bluetooth can in fact be used as an enabler to extend the reach of body networks to other devices and networks. I'll touch on this later.

Next: Using The Body As A Communications Medium