Low-Power Platform and Communications for the Development of Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Abstract

Although the roles of body sensor networks (BSNs) are similar to those carried out by the generic wireless sensor networks (WSNs), new solutions must be established to optimize communications for true pervasive biomedical monitoring transparent to the user. In this paper, a proposal of a hardware and software platform for biomedical sensors is performed, which is specially designed to minimize energy consumption in BSNs through a modular processing scheme based on the detection of events and information abstraction. The data flow is implemented through a novel communications protocol that enhances the performances of consumption and time delay of the platform. A novel aspect of the protocol is the explicit incorporation of an additional level of communications to support the distributed processing architecture that allows the execution of multiple applications in parallel within the smart sensors. The results obtained with an implementation of a smart sensor for fall detection demonstrate its feasibility as well as the viability of the communication protocol for the development of energy-efficient BSNs.