IF YOU spend hours downloading songs to your iPod, the days of fiddling around with wires are coming to an end. A Japanese company has discovered that the best cables may be your arms and legs.

According to NTT Laboratories, your whole body is the perfect conductor for electronic data, meaning that information such as music and films could be downloaded in seconds via your elbow.

NTT, the Japanese telecoms group, and the team of scientists that invented the Red Tacton system, envisage a future in which the human body acts as a non-stop conduit for information. Wireless networks — often hampered by intermittent service — will eventually be replaced, NTT says, by “human area networks”.

The developers are convinced that the new technology will be “highly disruptive” — undermining existing wireless industries and causing everyone to rethink the way that everyday actions could be undertaken. Field tests are under way and the first commercial appearance of Red Tacton is expected next year.

The Red Tacton chips will be embedded in machines and contain a transmitter and receiver built to send and accept any form of data stored in a digital format. The chip then takes any type of file — such as an MP3 music file or e-mail — and converts it into digital pulses that can be passed and read through a human being’s electric field. The chip in the receiving device reads these tiny changes and converts the file back into its original form.

With Red Tacton sensors miniaturised and built into every type of device and product, the list of potential uses is endless, Hideki Sakamoto, of NTT, said during an exclusive demonstration for The Times. By simply touching an advertising poster, for example, product information and an order form could be sent to your laptop. Shake hands with a new contact, and every detail that would normally appear on a business card will leap across your arms and download itself to your mobile phone.

Dr Sakamoto’s Red Tacton takes advantage of the long-overlooked electric field that surrounds the human body. Other researchers, including IBM, have tried and failed to harness the power of this minute and unstable flow of current across the skin, but NTT’s approach during the past five years of research has been different. Rather than attempting to use the body’s natural electricity itself, Red Tacton exploits the tiny variations in the overall field and the way in which they affect highly sensitive lasers — changes that are collected by the “electro-optic crystal” that represents the key to the entire technology.

These minute fluctuations can be converted, then transmitted and read as digital messages, meaning that no current passes along the body.

Because the data transfer between Red Tacton machines involves no dial-up or logging-in, the transfer of information is virtually instantaneous.

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