An Autonomous Wireless Body Area Network Implementation Towards IoT Connected Healthcare Applications

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is a new technological paradigm that can connect things from various fields through the Internet. For the IoT connected healthcare applications, the wireless body area network (WBAN) is gaining popularity as wearable devices spring into the market. This paper proposes a wearable sensor node with solar energy harvesting and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) transmission that enables the implementation of an autonomous WBAN. Multiple sensor nodes can be deployed on different positions of the body to measure the subjects body temperature distribution, heartbeat and detect falls. A web based smartphone application is also developed for displaying the sensor data and fall notification. To extend the lifetime of the wearable sensor node, a flexible solar energy harvester with an output based maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique is used to power the sensor node.

Existing System

Multi-sensor fusion in body sensor networks.

Proposed System

This paper proposes a wearable sensor node with solar energy harvesting and BLE transmission to implement an autonomous WBAN. The solar energy harvester is controlled by an output based MPPT technique to extract the maximum power from a flexible solar panel. The sensor node is integrated with an onboard accelerometer, temperature sensor and a plug-in PPG sensor on a flexible solar panel. Multiple nodes can be deployed on different positions of the body to measure the temperature distribution of the body. The node can also measure the heartbeat and detect the fall of the subject. All the data from the sensor nodes and fall notification will be transmitted to a web-based smartphone application through a commercial BLE module. When the sensor node is set to an appropriate wake-sleep mode, the 24 hours operation of the sensor node powered by the solar energy harvester is achieved and verified by experiments.

Architecture

Flexible wearable sensor node with energy harvesting