A reliable wearable system for BAN applications with a high number of sensors and high data rate

• Type: Chapter or Part of a Book
• Date: 2019

Authors

F. Derogarian (Author) Other; João Canas Ferreira (Author) FEUP; Vítor Grade Tavares (Author) FEUP; José Machado da Silva (Author) FEUP; F. J. Velez (Author) Other

Book

Title: Wearable Technologies and Wireless Body Sensor Networks for Healthcare

Pages: 53-87

ISBN: 9781785612176

Electronic ISBN: 9781785612183

Indexing

Scopus - 0 Citations

INSPEC

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00R-036

DOI: 10.1049/pbhe011e_ch3

Abstract (EN): This chapter addresses a wearable body area network (BAN) system for both medical and nonmedical applications, especially those including a large number of sensors at BAN scale (<250), embedded in textile and with high data rate (<9+9 MHz) communication demands. The overall system includes an on-body central processing module (CPM) connected to a computer via a wireless link and a wearable sensor network. Due to the fixed location of the sensors and the possibility of using conductive yarns in textiles, a wired network has been considered for the wearable components. Employing conductive yarns instead of using wireless links provides a more reliable communication, higher data rates and throughput, and less power consumption. The wearable unit is composed of two types of circuits, the sensor nodes (SNs) and a base station (BS), all connected to each other with conductive yarns forming a mesh topology with the base node at the center. The reliability analysis shows that communication in a multi-hop connection of sensors in mesh topology is more reliable than in the conventional star topology. From the standpoint of the network, each SN is a four port router capable of handling packets from destination nodes to the BS. The end-to-end communication uses packet switching for packet delivery from SNs to the BS or in the reverse direction, or between SNs. The communication module has been implemented in a low power field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and a microcontroller. The maximum data rate of the system is 9+9 Mbps while supporting tens of sensors, which is much more than current BAN applications need. The suitability of the proposed system for utilization in real applications has been demonstrated experimentally.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 35