A Body Sensor Networks Development Platform for Pervasive Healthcare

Abstract

Technology advantages of wireless sensor networks have shown great deal of promises in various biomedical applications. In this paper we introduced a specially-designed body sensor networks (BSN) development platform for on-body physiological measurements and body-proximal wireless data communications. The BSN platform we have developed insofar include BSN node boards, a photoplethysmograph sensor electronics board, a respiratory inductive plethysmograph sensor electronics board, a battery board with a charger IC, a base-station board and several prototyping boards. We have designed the software architecture towards an efficient self-contained baseband protocol to network several BSN modules. Evaluation results from several applications indicated that the complete platform works as intended. Our BSN platform was designed in a low power and stackable manner so that in the future it could be easily extended with more functionality. We believe the BSN platform will greatly facilitate the research and development activities for pervasive healthcare, telemedicine, wearable medical devices and other emerging biomedical engineering fields.