Self-Calibrating Body Sensor Network Based on Periodic Human Movements

Body sensor networks with a central gateway node can control wireless transmission and optimize the network lifetime. The central node should be placed within communication reach of other nodes spread out around the human body, such as on the chest. This paper reports a novel energy-efficient time multiplexing transmission method based on the human rhythmic movement of running for on-body wireless communication. The running style of each individual allows the network to self-calibrate the communication scheme so that transmissions occur only when high link reliability is predicted. This technique takes advantage of the periodic running actions to implement a dynamic time division multiple access strategy for a five node body network with very little communication overhead, long sleep times for the sensor transceivers, and robustness to communication errors. The results showed all wireless communications were successful, except when two nodes attempt to use the transmission medium simultaneously. An aggregated network reliability of 90% was achieved compared to 63% when employing traditional time multiplexing algorithms.