Sony to Use Human Body to Transmit Sound

Sony is doing some interesting work on what looks like the new wave of Walkmans from the Japanese giant, if the US Patent and Trademark filing they made is anything to go by. Their new idea is about wireless headphones, but not your conventional Bluetooth or WiFi—they plan to use the human body to wirelessly transmit sound from the device to the headphones. 

They pose to achieve the same by sending encoded audio signals through an electric field in the body right up to the headphones, which will decode the signal to result in sound. Unlike FM-based methods, this technology should claim better quality and more secure transmission, only to your headphones.

Bandwidth seems to be the biggest barrier here, as the technology at present is unable to exceed 48 kbps ATRAC3plus encoding, which may not 'sound too good' to quality enthusiasts who like to encode their music in high-quality, 192 kbps MP3s and more, but hey it's a start. Maybe in the future we'll have lossless audio being piped through our veins.

But the question is this—what happens if you take out the Walkman and put it on the table?

P.S.: The picture is of an old cassette Walkman with wireless headphones based on FM—the WM-F606–released in 1989!