NTT's RedTacton makes broadband networking possible via human skin

• Your body could soon be the backbone of a broadband personal data network linking your mobile phone or MP3 player to a cordless headset, your digital camera to a PC or printer, and all the gadgets you carry around to each other.
• These personal area networks are already possible using radio-based technologies, such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or just plain old cables to connect devices.
• But NTT, the Japanese communications company, has developed a technology called RedTacton, which it claims can send data over the surface of the skin at speeds of up to 2Mbps -- equivalent to a fast broadband data connection.
• NTT is not the first company to use the human body as a conduit for data: IBM pioneered the field in 1996 with a system that could transfer small amounts of data at very low speeds, and last June, Microsoft was granted a patent for "a method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body."
• A transmitter attached to a device, such as an MP3 player, uses this field to send data by modulating the field minutely in the same way that a radio carrier wave is modulated to carry information.
• These deflections are measured and converted back into electrical signals to retrieve the transmitted data.
• An obvious question, however, is why anyone would bother networking though their body when proven radio-based personal area networking technologies, such as Bluetooth, already exist?
• Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco, says that while Bluetooth or other radio technologies may be perfectly suitable to link gadgets for many personal area networking purposes, there are certain applications for which RedTacton technology would be ideal.