A unified framework for energy efficient physical activity tracking

A unified framework of joint state tracking and control design is proposed for energy-efficient physical activity tracking in heterogeneous Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The objective is to devise sensor selection strategies for the WBAN´s fusion center to optimize the trade-off between tracking performance and energy consumption. Our recently proposed Kalman-like estimator is employed for state tracking. The associated mean-squared error and an appropriate energy consumption metric are used in a partially observable Markov decision process formulation to derive the optimal selection strategy. A low-complexity suboptimal strategy is also proposed. Numerical results are provided using real WBAN experimental data.