Energy saving mechanism for a smart wearable system: Monitoring infants during the sleep

Abstract

In Smart Wearable Systems (SWS), the wearable devices are powered by batteries with very limited energy available. These emergent systems have strong Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, with focus on reliable communication and low power consumption. This is the scope of the Baby Night Watch, a project developed in the context of the European Texas Instruments Innovation Challenge (TIIC) 2015. This Project consists of a monitoring tool for infants, which matches different emergent research fields. SWSs require energy saving mechanism to reduce the energy wasting during wireless communications. A Transmission Power Control (TPC) mechanism that changes its characteristics according to the scenario of operation, is proposed. It uses sensors to determine the position of the infant and, based on that, predicts the current state of the channel. Other TPC algorithms are implemented and their performance are compared with our novel mechanism. The proposed TPC mechanism outperforms the existing ones in terms of the energy saving.

Wearable Wireless Body Area Nodes for Remote Physiological Signal Monitoring System

“…The wearable systems for monitoring the physiological signals developed so far targets a number of applications such as home healthcare monitoring [3], physiological status monitoring of soldier's health conditions in a battle field [4,5], monitoring the health status of astronauts in space [6], coal mine workers [7][8][9], fire fighters fighting fire [10][11][12], Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) [13]. A wearable belt to monitor body temperature, heart and breathing rates and body position of babies has connectivity using ZigBee to monitor SIDS in infants [14]. A wearable system named Health Gear to monitor the users blood oxygen level and pulse while sleeping and algorithms for automatically detecting sleep apnea events and having connectivity to a mobile phone using Bluetooth and the system performance evaluated on 20 volunteers [15].…”