| Vol. 4, No. 1, May 2007 - Art. 7 |
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| Inertial sensors for Wireless Body Area Networks: the WiMoCA
Solution |
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by
Elisabetta Farella, Augusto Pieracci,
Luca Benini, DEIS -University of Bologna; Andrea Acquaviva,
ISTI- Urbino University
Copyright
Copyright © Università degli Studi di Bologna,
Università degli Studi di Urbino, 2007 |
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Abstract
Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASN) are an emerging technology
enabling the design of natural Human Computer Interfaces (HCI).
Automatic recognition of human motion, gestures, and activities
is studied in several contexts. For example, mobile computing technology
is being considered as a replacement of traditional input systems.
Moreover, body posture and activity monitoring can be used for entertainment
and health-care applications.
However, until now, little work has been done to develop flexible
and efficient WBASN solutions suitable for a wide range of applications.
Their requirements pose new challenges for sensor network designs,
such as optimizing traditional solutions for use as environmental
monitoring-like applications and developing on-the-field stress
tests.
In this paper, we demonstrate the flexibility of a custom-designed
WBASN called WiMoCA with respect to a wide range of posture and
activity recognition applications by means of practical implementation
and on-the-field testing. pproach taken in the design of WiMoCA
provides the necessary effectiveness. Software support, communication
protocols and hardware architecture have been designed to match
requirements of WBASN applications. Nodes of the network mounted
on different parts of the human body exploit tri-axial accelerometers
to detect its movements. The advanced digital Micro-electro-mechanical
system (MEMS) based inertial sensor has been chosen for WiMoCA because
it demonstrated high flexibility of use in many different situations,
providing the chance to exploit both static and dynamic acceleration
components for different purposes. Furhermore, the sensibility and
accuracy of the sensing element is perfectly adequate for monitoring
human movement, while keeping cost low and size compact, thus meeting
our requirements.
We implemented three types of applications, stressing the WBASN
in many aspects. In fact, they are characterized by different requirements
in terms of accuracy, timeliness, and computation distributed on
sensing nodes. For each application, we describe its implementation,
and we discuss results about performance and power consumption.
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