Dynamic and energy efficient wireless BAN platform for remote health monitoring

This paper presents experimental results on a fully functional body area network (BAN) platform in terms of energy consumption, delivery ratio and lifespan. The proposed BAN platform captures, processes, and wirelessly transmits six-degrees-of-freedom inertial and electrocardiogram data in a wearable, non-invasive form factor. A dynamic TDMA MAC layer has been implemented over a 802.15.4 physical layer as well as 2 lightweight protocols: a similarity-based filter to reduce the number of packets sent by the sensors and a polynomial interpolation technique to reduce the size of the packets sent by the coordinator. The system is evaluated regarding the delivery rate, the energy consumption efficiency and the lifetime while considering 3 scenarios and several human activities (sitting, walking, and running). In addition, we compare the sensors´ lifespan when bluetooth or 802.15.4 is used. The experimental results show that the proposed MAC layer reduces the number of collisions and is particularly adapted to periodic data traffic from biomedical sensors. Moreover, significant improvements in energy consumption and lifetime are observed enabling health care applications and remote monitoring in harsh environments.