On-body localization experiments using real IR-UWB devices

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) offer coarse but stand-alone motion capture and navigation capabilities through peer-to-peer ranging and on-body nodes positioning, relying uniquely on transmitted radio signals and exchanged data packets. This paper accounts for new field experiments based on integrated ultra low power Impulse Radio - Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) devices in the WBAN context. One first goal is to confront and partly validate existing on-body ranging error models and assumptions based on Time Of Arrival (TOA) estimation. Another objective consists in exploiting the full mesh intra-WBAN topology to perform relative Motion Capture (MoCap) in a body-strapped Local Coordinate System (LCS). In particular, we consider adapting here a Constrained Distributed Weighted Multi-Dimensional Scaling (CDWMDS) algorithm fed by cooperative inter-node range measurements, where the estimated locations of on-body nodes are asynchronously updated based on their neighborhood information, under further geometric constraints related to time-invariant fixed-length links.