Intra-body communication (IBC) is a wireless communications technology that uses a person’s body as the transmission medium for imperceptible electrical signals. Intra-body communication also allows data to be transferred when a person touches an IBC-enabled device. In order to know more details about this technology, take a look at the Zimmerman’s thesis.

The IBC study has started in the early 1990. Since then, numerous studies have been published, nevertheless this technology has not won mass adoption, maybe because it is not mature enough yet.

Most persons have behavioral patterns. For example, I usually wake up then take a shower, eat breakfast, brush my teeth, and then grab my stuff and leave to the office (of course, in this example I am being very brief). I can think of many services using IBC technology; one of them is behavior awareness, in other words, a service that tracks a user’s behavior to support him.

In order to track a user behavior at home it is necessary to have an IBC-enabled device in contact with the skin, for example his watch, and some key objects also IBC compliant. To track my morning behavioral pattern I should have in my house the fridge, the shower, my cell phone, my toothbrush, the stove, my room’s door, the house’s main door, and maybe some few more IBC compliant devices. When I touch those devices I would be enabling a communication channel between them and the watch. The watch could be designed to store data (what and when I touch) provided by my interaction with the objects. From time to time the watch could update the main computer in the home with the stored information (many other solutions also could be used). This computer would be responsible to work on the raw data and transform them into useful information, for example, identifying my morning behavioral pattern.

Adapting objects to be IBC compliant is not science fiction, actually here in Telecom Italia there are some trials going on. Those IBC compliant devices must have the technology (which could be embedded in some sort of tag), to transmit and receive information when in connection with other IBC compliant device. The idea is to use the human body as the connection link.

Once we have identified the user behavioral pattern it is possible to offer several services. Consider an elderly who lives by himself. Elderly may need some extra care, since they are more susceptible to fall, or have some health problems. If it is identified a very different behavioral pattern of the monitored person he might need help, in this case a computer in the house could call for help. The same idea could be applied to help any kind of people that need extra care.

I believe that intra-body communication is a technology with a great potential; I hope to see cool services becoming widespread soon.

The holy grail for many scientists have been the capability to duplicate the photosyntheses process that makes the world tick. It is thanks to plants, and their leaves that the energy of the sun is transformed into chemical energy that can then be used by the plant, other plants and all animals in the food chain to sustain life.

Sun light energy transformed in chemical energy through photosyntheses

Now scientists from the MIT have announced at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Associations held in Anaheim they succeeded in creating an artificial photosynthesis machine. It is not the first time, the feat was achieved already ten years ago but at that time it required the use of very expensive materials and had a very short life time, after a few hours it stopped working. So it was not practical nor economically feasible.

Now the scientists have succeeded in creating a photosyntheses process at a low cost and with a 10 fold efficiency in energy conversion terms with respect to natural leaves. And, they promise, it is going to get better.

The key to their success is the invention of new catalysts based on nickel and cobalt that can split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. The device is basically a transparent cylinder containing water (tap water is fine). The light from the sun bring energy into the cylinder and this energy is used to split the water molecules. The resulting gases, O and H, are then fed to a fuel cell to produce electricity.

Now, just wait a moment before disconnecting your home from the mains. When they say that their process is 10 times more efficient than the one running in the plants’ leaves they are not telling a lie but even ten folds solar energy conversion is not quite enough to light a single bulb. You need plenty of “artificial leaves” to do that. Even though we cannot start to power our homes from these artificial leaves today we can say that a new exploration path has been convincingly opened and in a few years we can expect “fruits” out of these leaves…

The idea of making every home energy self sufficient is the goal. May be our kids or grandkids will take that for granted.