ABSTRACT
Body Area Networks (BANs), known as enabling technology for
many biomedical applications, are composed of body-worn sensor
devices that can provide mobile and continuous monitoring of
the human body. This chapter presents an overview of platform
design strategies for BANs with applications in physical movement
monitoring. First, an introduction to several compelling applications
is given, which shows BAN versatility in both medical and
recreational fields. Applications are important in the sense that they
help in understanding design requirements of the BAN platform.
An architecture of the system, including hardware and software
components, is then described. It is followed by a description of
typical signal processing for movement monitoring applications.
While this type of signal processing flow can be generally used
in movement monitoring applications, in order to take the most
advantage of the system, the signal processing needs to be custom
tailored for each individual application. An example of this process
is shown based on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) movement
annotation applications. Finally, the chapter is concluded with
discussion of possible BAN system optimizations. In particular, it is
shown that the energy consumption of the system can be reduced by
using buffers to decrease the number of transmissions.
