Exchange Email Addresses With A Handshake

Eye of the Frog writes "Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. and its subsidiary NTT DoCoMo Inc. have developed a device that attaches to your PDA which uses the body's conductivity to transmit data at an amazing 10 megabits per second."

Re:How about people with pace makers?

[mclearn]

The article states that the device uses the body's natural conductivity. Hence, there should be no issues regarding those with pace-makers.

Re:How about people with pace makers?

[LinuxInDallas]

Pacemakers and other implantables typically communicate with external devices using low power RF signals. It's quite possible that this networking could interfere with operation of the device. There are rumors of airport security x-ray machines causing havoc in some types of devices. It's the responsibility of the medical device manufacturer to make sure an implant meets certain criteria for EMI/RFI but those requirements are not all that strenuous to meet.

Re:Seen this...?

[dacarr]

There used to be something like what you described, but it didn't involve people shaking hands; rather it was computers.

It was called UUCP and there's a reason that for the most part it is no longer used. Two words: IT SUCKED.

Re:Now Just Wait a Second

[achurch]

I have a suspicion that news.au.com is getting one slipped to them. The closest Google result I could get with "NTT NoCoMo skin" is this article about a cell phone that conducts sound through bone and cartilage, enabling you to listen to the call by sticking your finger in your ear.

Maybe you could try actually reading the article? It clearly states the source of the news, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun [nikkei.co.jp], and in fact the article is right at the top of the "companies" section (link [nikkei.co.jp], or Fish translation [altavista.com]).

Re:Seen this...?

[machowsk]

I remember reading about this or seeing it on TV or something several years ago. MIT's media lab were playing around with this idea and got it working, I believe. (Although I'm not sure if they got 10Mbps throughput) They were storing the data in chips inserted inside shoes. Apparently they thought that they could harness some excess energy in your shoes when you walk to power the chips. Here's [ce.org] an older article mentioning it. And here's [allnetdevices.com] another. (Best I could find.)

I knew I saw this before..

[Dr. Awktagon]

Yup, from somewhere in the shady corners of my mind I distinctly recall IBM research working on a Personal Area Network (PAN). I think I might've even read about it on slashdot a couple years ago.

Sure enough a, Google search turns up this page [ibm.com] on PANs, circa 1996.

So how can NTT claim they "developed" the technology?

Re:Wow

[Henry V .009]

I'd have to disagree with the result. The bandwidth of the penis is given as 78 Mb/s. However, most of our genome is exactly the same for all human beings. So all that really has to be transmitted are the base pairs that differ. This is probably on the order of less than 1%. This means that a cable modem could probably transmit the same bandwidth as a penis using good compression software.

Re:How about people with pace makers?

[AvitarX]

I would assume this is a high frequency electricity (10 mbits/second is a lot of info). High frequency electricity will travel over the surface without penatrating, so it should not be an issue.

National geographic had a guy standing on a charged plat, shooting electricity that went through (over) him into the rod, it was cool.

People with pacemakers don't die from static shocks, I find it hard to believe that people would use a technology that was more disruptive then that.

might work...

[ryochiji]

In a crowded train in Tokyo, you'd have a network with up to 50 nodes. That could be some serious computing power there (assuming that processing power of phones and PDAs increase significantly).

Re:Wow

[Thenomain]

Does that mean most of my data transfer would be logged as "localhost"?

Some Clarifications

[kepart]

I've been doing my PhD work on systems like this (Intrabody Communication). It does work! However, there are a number of issues, some of which aren't clear from the article.

First, 10 Mbps is possible, but that's getting near the theoretical limit. The datarate is limited by the bandwidth, and the bandwidth is limited by the fact that around 50MHz, the signal wavelength is about four times the size of a person, which means the person turns into an antenna, and the whole system becomes essentially a short range radio.

Second, because these systems operate in the near field, the signal travels through a current loop, and not as plane waves in free space. This means that there has to be some kind of grounding path for current to flow back to the transmitter after going through the person. This is why it works so well to put transceivers in shoes -- the ground path can flow through earth ground (or any conductive material in the floor). For devices held in hands, the very small (femtofarad) capacitance of free space is enough, but the signal does suffer more from noise. Devices in purses, etc. also have this problem, and may have difficulty establishing the ground connection depending on the material the purse is made from and the other objects inside it.

One issue that to my knowledge has not been addressed very well is guaranteeing that the signal is received during--and only during--physical contact. There is a large dependence of signal strength on geometry. The devices I've constructed can communicate when they're brought near (~10 cm) of each other, touching or not. There are a few solutions, such as looking at jumps in signal strength, but they tend to be confused when a person without a transceiver happens to touch the object, and a person with a transceiver is nearby. I'm currently working on this problem for my PhD dissertation, so if you have any good ideas or know of related work, I'd love to hear from you.

If you'd like to read more, the first (and most detailed) publication I know about on this idea was Thomas Zimmerman's Masters Thesis at the MIT AI Lab. You find it here: http://www.media.mit.edu/physics/publications/thes es/95.09.zimmerman.pdf [mit.edu]

------
Kurt Partridge
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195

Re:Here's what I don't get...

[BTWR]

OK, here's the math...

If you've never used a Palm before... or at least a Palm V (which is what I have...)

1. You have to hold down the phonebook button for 3 seconds to send the bussiness card [Total: 3 seconds]

2. A note pops up "Looking for receiver" for a 2 seconds, [5 seconds]

3. The note gets beamed, taking a second[6 seconds]

4. Palm has it's "accept message" sign, taking the other user 1-5 seconds to answer [7-12 seconds]

I'm sure you'll find a problem with this, but it's my math. I know the 10 Mbit will change #3 (which is why I made it a second, not 1-2 or 3 seconds as it is with mine), but it won't change the fact that the Palm's internal setup is still lax.

Re:hehe, nippon

[orthogonal]

whats is the origin of the word 'nip' in racial text to asians [and "wog" and "nigger"]?

"Nip" is short for "Nippon", the Japanese name for their country, or short for "Nipponese", the Japanese name for the people of Japan.

"Nigger" derives from words various European languages use for the adjective "black"; various etymologists speculate in originated in the French, the Spanish, or the Portugese words for "black".

"Wog", a disparaging British slang term for non-European "native" peoples, or in some constructs ("the wogs start at Calais") anyone not British, probably derives from Golliwog, a rag doll with African features in a children's storybook, though some probably apocryphal folk etymologies claim it's an abbreviation -- sarcasticly-applied -- of "Worthy Oriental Gentleman". Apparently the term is also applied, derisively, by mmebers of the Church of Scientology to non-Scientologists (?).

In any case, all these terms are considered disparaging and offensive, especially when used by persons of whom they are not descriptive. (Although "nigger" finds a use, within the black American population when applied to others of the same ethnicity, similar in meaning to "(that black) person".)

Biological bandwidth.

[Perdo]

In a healthy male:

30-60 million sperm per cc of semen.

2-5 cc's of semen.

Up to 228 gigabytes of data in about 5 seconds.

or about 365 gigabits per second.

Men like computers because they are impotent compared to us.

The monthly estrus cycle equates to about 2.5 kb/s

Even a phone modem is faster than a woman.

IBM demoed this a while back...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that IBM ran a demo of this technology several years ago and called it a PAN "Personal Area Network". Used some prototyped PDAs with tilt navigation, etc.

IBM has this before '97

[DreddUK]

IBM Research was trying this out before '97. Check out the link to their research site on PAN (Personal Area Networks).

http://www.research.ibm.com/topics/popups/smart/mo bile/html/pan.html [ibm.com]