The skinny on IT – Microsoft gets a patent on the human body as a computer bus

IT SOUNDS like an April Fool’s Day joke, but it isn’t. Microsoft, that imperialist of the information-technology world, has actually succeeded in patenting the human body as a computer network. US Patent 6,754,472, issued to the company on June 22nd, is for a “method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body”.

US Patent 6,754,472 has just been granted to Microsoft.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2876950

At the moment, übergeeks who want to create a so-called personal area network (PAN) have to link their personal electronic devices—mobile phones, pagers, personal data assistants (PDAs) and so on—using infra-red or radio signals. What Microsoft is proposing is to use the skin’s own conductive properties to transmit the data needed to create such a network. And the firm does not stop at people. A “wide variety of living animals”, it says, could be used to create computer buses, as they are known technically, in this manner.

Many people today carry a range of portable electronic devices, each with its own keypad, speaker, display, processing unit and power supply. The idea behind the patent is to get rid of some of these items. If such gizmos were networked, it would be possible to have, say, just one keypad for a mobile phone, an MP3 music player and a PDA. The keypad might even be a person’s forearm. As the patent puts it, “The physical resistance offered by the human body can be used in implementing a keypad or other input device as well as estimating distances between devices and device locations. In accordance with the present invention, by varying the distance on the skin between the contacts corresponding to different keys, different signal values can be generated representing different inputs.” In other words you can, in theory, type on your skin.

Microsoft suggests using the body to generate power for the network, too. A “kinetic power converter” in the wearer’s shoe or wristwatch would produce electricity in the same way that an old-fashioned self-winding watch extracted energy from its owner’s normal movements.

The patent points out that networked portable devices which employ infra-red or radio-frequency communication have limitations. Radio devices use a lot of power, and are prone to interference from others operating on similar frequencies. There are also fears that people might be able to hack into them or, at the least, listen in. Infra-red communication suffers the same problems, but has the additional limitation of requiring a direct line of sight between objects—as anyone who has tried to operate a television remote control with someone else standing between him and the television will know. Microsoft claims that its approach of “near field intrabody communication” does not suffer from these problems, and provides a secure way to transfer data between devices.

It all sounds very revolutionary, but Microsoft is not (as is often the case with the firm’s “innovations”) actually the pioneer in the field. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory and IBM jointly developed the idea of using the human body as a personal network nearly a decade ago. The first prototype PAN, which was demonstrated at the Comdex trade show in 1996, showed how two people could transmit business-card details to each other electronically, via a handshake. Little has been done since then to take the technology forward, and most people seem satisfied with the capabilities provided by radio-frequency PANs such as Bluetooth.

Microsoft is keeping its cards close to its chest, and has declined to comment on how, exactly, it intends to develop its patent into something that people will actually want to buy. Some of the features of Microsoft’s PAN would put off even the most avid technophile—the most obvious being the problem of how the electronic devices it links up are themselves to be attached to the body. The patent suggests a pair of electrodes, attached to the skin, for each device. The trade-off between eliminating redundant input/output devices and the inconvenience of having to attach dozens of electrodes to your skin does not obviously favour the latter. Still, you have to admire them for trying.