Molecular Me: When I Realized the Network Was the Body

The title pretty much gives this one away.

Molecular Me.

We’re going inside the body today—but we’re getting there by taking a rather strange detour through my own history with computers.

Back in 1995 or 1996, I took classes on how to build a computer, use Microsoft, create spreadsheets, and work with DOS commands.

Yes. DOS.

Some of you may be old enough to remember.

I loved it because it intrigued me into learning more. 

I was one of those people who could sit down at a computer and completely lose track of time. Once I discovered the internet, that only got worse. I would surf around for hours, following one interesting thing into another.

By around 2000, I was taking computer networking classes at ITT Technical Institute.

That’s where I first came across something called a Wireless Body Area Network—or WBAN.

I remember learning about networks as a technology problem.

• How do you get devices to communicate?
• How do you move information?
• How do you connect sensors?
• How do you get data from one place to another without running a physical cable?

At the time, that’s how I saw it.

• Computers.
• Devices.
• Networks.
• Information.

I had absolutely no idea how interesting that word body was going to become to me years later. Because when I first heard Wireless Body Area Network, I was thinking about technology surrounding the body. I wasn’t thinking about what was inside the body.

I wasn’t thinking about ions.

I wasn’t thinking about membrane potentials.

I wasn’t thinking about electrically charged particles.

I wasn’t thinking about mitochondria. 

Looking back, I can’t believe how little I understood about my own biology.

I knew the body was made of cells. I knew cells contained molecules. I knew the nervous system used electrical signals. But I hadn’t yet put all of those pieces together. I didn’t understand the body as the extraordinarily complex electrochemical system that it is. And that changed the way I began looking at wireless technology.

The Body Is Electric Before It’s Chemical

We’ve gotten very comfortable talking about wireless technology as though the only thing happening is information traveling from one device to another.

👉🏼Your watch talks to your phone.

👉🏼Your phone talks to the tower.

👉🏼Your earbuds talk to your phone.

A medical sensor collects information and sends it somewhere else.

Simple enough. Except the antenna isn’t floating in empty space. It’s sitting on a human being. Or many times inside one.

The IEEE standard for Wireless Body Area Networks describes systems involving wireless communication in the vicinity of, or inside, the human body. The technology has been developed for things such as wearable sensors, medical monitoring, implantable devices and other systems designed to collect and transmit information associated with the body.  And once you start looking at the technology from the biological side, you run directly into a subject that I find much more fascinating: electromagnetism and molecules. Because that’s what we’re made of.

So What Happens When the Signal Meets the Molecule?

Let’s start with something incredibly ordinary.

Water.

The human body contains a tremendous amount of it, and water is a polar molecule. It has an uneven distribution of electrical charge.

Now put an oscillating electromagnetic field into the picture. The electric field interacts with charged and polar matter. That’s physics. Then we have ions.

• Sodium.
• Potassium.
• Calcium.
• Chloride.
• Hydrogen ions.

These aren’t just random ingredients floating around in us. Their concentrations and movements are part of how cells maintain electrical gradients and communicate.

Then there’s the cell membrane.

A tiny structure separating two electrically different environments.

And then there are proteins that respond to changes in their environment, including ion channels and transport proteins.

Then there are mitochondria with their own electrochemical gradients.

👉🏼Then neurons.

👉🏼Then muscle cells.

👉🏼Then the heart.

👉🏼Then the brain.

Suddenly, that little computer-networking term I heard all those years ago starts sounding very different.

Wireless Body Area Network.

The network isn’t simply around the body.

It’s interacting with a body that already has an extraordinarily complicated biological signaling system.

And Then I Found the Frequency Numbers

This is where I started paying attention.

The IEEE 802.15.6 framework includes several communication approaches and frequency ranges. Earlier implementations included narrowband RF bands from approximately 402 MHz to 2.4835 GHz, while its UWB provisions extended into several GHz ranges. There is also a human-body-communication approach that uses the body itself as part of the transmission medium. 

Read that again.

The body itself can become part of the communication system. That’s the kind of sentence that makes me stop scrolling. Because now we’re not simply talking about a computer sitting on a desk communicating with another computer. We’re talking about technology designed specifically around the physical characteristics of the human body. And engineers have to account for those characteristics. 

The IEEE documentation discusses the effect of the human body on portable antennas, changes caused by body movement, and radiation-pattern shaping intended to reduce specific absorption rate, or SAR, in the body. (IEEE Standards Association)

That’s fascinating to me.

Because it means the body isn’t treated as an irrelevant object sitting between two pieces of technology. The body is part of the engineering problem.

Which Makes Me Wonder About the Other Side of the Equation: 

Engineers have to understand how the electromagnetic signal behaves around the body. They have to understand attenuation. They have to understand absorption. They have to understand how different tissues affect propagation. They have to understand antennas near biological tissue. They have to understand movement. They have to understand power. They have to understand interference.

But what about the other side?

What happens at the biological level?

What happens when electromagnetic energy encounters molecules?

What happens around membranes?

What happens with ions?

What happens to proteins?

What happens to mitochondrial electrical gradients?

What happens when exposure isn’t one isolated device, but an environment containing multiple wireless sources?

And perhaps most importantly:

What do we actually know?

That’s the part I’m interested in.

Not the slogans.

Definitely not the arguments.

Not somebody’s two-sentence social-media opinion.

✋The actual physics.

✋The frequency.

👉🏼The power.

👉🏼The exposure.

🚨The tissue.

• The duration.
• The modulation.
• The measured biological response.

That’s where things get interesting—especially because I’m constantly using these devices. 

My Old Computer Classes Suddenly Look Different

Here’s the funny part.

When I was sitting in those computer classes in the 1990s, I was learning how computers communicated.

Then I learned networking.

Then wireless networking became commonplace.

Then everything started getting connected.

• Phones.
• Cars.
• Watches.
• Homes.
• Medical equipment.
• Sensors.
• Appliances.

And now we’re building increasingly sophisticated systems designed to communicate with and around the human body.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent years learning something I somehow never thought much about back then:

I’m electrical, too.

Not metaphorically. Biologically. This is not pseudoscience. 

• My cells maintain voltage.
• My nerves use electrical impulses.
• My heart depends on electrical conduction.
• My muscles respond to electrical signals.

Ions move through channels.

Mitochondria maintain electrochemical gradients.

The chemistry of life and the electricity of life aren’t two completely separate stories.

They’re intertwine—just like the spine is connected to every other part of our bodies. 

And suddenly I started looking at the phrase Wireless Body Area Network differently.

This Is Where I Want to Go Next

I’m not writing this because I have one neat conclusion wrapped up in a bow.

Actually, it’s the opposite.

I found a rabbit hole a long time ago and it goes much deeper than I expected.

I want to know what happens when you take a biological system that is already electrically active and place increasingly sophisticated wireless technologies around it.

I want to understand the difference between frequency and power.

I want to understand SAR.

I want to understand penetration depth.

I want to understand what different tissues do to different frequencies.

I want to understand the difference between thermal and non-thermal biological observations.

I want to understand what researchers have actually measured at the cellular level.

And I want to know what questions still haven’t been answered.

Because there’s something almost comical about my own journey.

I started out learning how to make computers communicate.

Decades later, I’m looking at the thing I should have been studying all along: the computer I’m walking around in. This is why Human Computer exists: Have you gotten your copy?

Anyhow, that’s Molecular Me this time! 

And if you’ve never looked up IEEE 802.15.6, Wireless Body Area Networks, human body communication, SAR, RF tissue absorption, ion channels, membrane potential, and mitochondrial electrochemical gradients, this might be a good place to start.

Go down the rabbit hole with us. I don’t expect you to take my word for it. it’s best to look at the numbers, engineering papers, and the biological evidence. Start with your copy of The Foundational Building Block for the Human Computer. Then drop us a line and tell us what you think.