ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of application-based view of the main components of the wireless sensor network (WSN)-enabled inertial sensor node (ISN). WSNs consist of resource-constrained wireless devices, named sensor nodes or motes, with designed sensing and control tasks. The chapter discusses the basic principles of inertial navigation, describes the error characteristics of micromachined electromechanical systems inertial measurement unit (IMU) and presents a well-known method for analyzing the error types associated with IMUs. Inertial navigation is a technique that measures linear acceleration and angular velocity to derive the position or location of an object attached to an inertial measurement unit IMU. The chapter explains the hardware design of the proposed WSN ISN and discusses antenna design issues for wearable sensor nodes. It also explains the hardware architecture of the sensor node. The conversion rules of these sensors are predefined according to sensor's specifications and the physical data are then interpolated from the read voltage with respect to those rules.
