Data transmission at a speed of 30 Mbps over a piece of meat using ultrasound

A team of scientists led by Andrew Singer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that ultrasonic signals can be used to transmit data through meat at speeds of up to 30 megabits per second. This is the highest data transmission rate for signals passing through animal tissue in the entire history of observations. For comparison, Netflix streaming video in Ultra HD format requires a channel of 25 megabits per second, reports spectrum .

Singer and his colleagues went beyond radiofrequency ultrasound — into the same region of the spectrum that is used to scan a developing fetus inside the uterus. The team observed the ultrasonic communication used to transmit signals under water, which can travel long distances without losing power.
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Singer explained: “Man is like a big bag of salt water, with bones and other tissues. Data exchange in the ocean and communication within our body are very similar. ”

Currently, most medical devices use radio frequencies for data transmission and are limited to a bandwidth of about 300 kHz.

The group published the results of its project "meat-comms" (meat communications) last month in the online magazine ArXiv, in which they explain that the tests show "the possibility of transmitting video data through tissue for ultrasonic communication with implanted medical devices in real time."

During the tests, a 5 MHz sensor was used to send a focused signal through a piece of meat to a tank of water in which there was a hydrophone for receiving it. It was found that he was able to send signals through the fabric for a short distance at a data transfer rate of 20-30 Mbps.

Jeremy Dahl, a radiologist at Stanford University who specializes in ultrasound devices, points out that the transducers in Singer’s study were only 5.86 centimeters apart from each other, with meat in between. Thus, it is unclear how medical devices already in the human body will be able to achieve similar results.

And since only meat was used in the experiment, the Singer group still does not know how ultrasonic signals will behave when passing through bones or skin.

Scientists hope to continue research on animals. In the future, higher data transfer rates achieved using ultrasound signals will allow doctors to ask the patient to swallow the camera and watch a live broadcast of how it passes through the digestive tract. Singer also mentioned the potential for a whole network of implants within the body that can communicate with each other over the wireless network.

Another advantage of this study may be practical application, which until now was not available to medical device manufacturers, for example, software updates for devices that are already inside a person.