Body Sensor Networks: A Holistic Approach From Silicon to Users

Abstract

Abstract-Body sensor networks (BSN) are emerging cyberphysical systems that promise to improve quality of life through improved healthcare, augmented sensing and actuation for the disabled, independent living for the elderly, and reduced healthcare costs. However, the physical nature of BSNs introduces new challenges. The human body is a highly dynamic physical environment that creates constantly changing demands on sensing, actuation, and quality of service. Movement between indoor and outdoor environments and physical movements constantly change the wireless channel characteristics. These dynamic application contexts can also have a dramatic impact on data and resource prioritization. Thus, BSNs must simultaneously deal with rapid changes to both top-down application requirements and bottom-up resource availability. This is made all the more challenging by the wearable nature of BSN devices, which necessitates a vanishingly small size and, therefore, extremely limited hardware resources and power budget. Current research is being performed to develop new principles and techniques for adaptive operation in highly dynamic physical environments, using miniaturized, energy-constrained devices. This paper describes a holistic cross-layer approach that addresses all aspects of the system, from low-level hardware design to higher-level communication and data fusion algorithms, to top-level applications.

Physiological Signals: The Next Generation Authentication and Identification Methods!?

“…The steep progress in sensor engineering throughout the last decade brought the progress that was needed to use physiological sensors for various applications (e.g., [25]). Sensors that enable physiological signal recording have declined in price, have become more reliable, and can be applied wireless [25]. Next, I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of physiological signals as biometrics.…”

“…As mentioned, the rapid development of non-invasive wireless sensors [25] have made them suitable for a wide range of applications [21], [23], [26]. As such, physiological signals can act a new class of interfaces (e.g., authentication and identification) between man and machine.…”

Towards a Framework for Safety Analysis of Body Sensor Networks

“…BSNs are typically governed by more stringent constraints on their resource consumption (e.g., energy and computational resources), as well as mobility and device size constraints (see [3] for discussion of such issues). More importantly, BSNs are operated in scenarios typically outside a clinical environment.…”

Design Considerations for Self-Powered Wearable Wireless Multimodal Vigilant Sensing Systems

“…This can be done by minimizing the size of the energy harvester, matching the sensing locations to the location of the energy harvester, integrating most of the system components onto small printed circuit boards, and by integrating sensors into textiles. 4. System Flexibility and Modularity Optimization (Section VIII) -Real-world deployments for a BSN can be unpredictable and its functional requirements can change as new information is acquired during research.…”

“…To address user acceptance, researchers have emphasized the importance of making BSNs wearable and wireless [3]. To address battery life, researchers have emphasized the importance of making BSNs ultra-low power so that they can operate for long periods of time on a small battery or even be powered by an energy harvester attached to the body [4]. If an energy harvester is used and the power that it generates is greater than the power that the system consumes, then the BSN achieves self-powered operation.…”