A wearable wireless sensor network for human limbs monitoring

In many applications, it is desired to monitor the human body motion to provide useful information for applications such as rehabilitation, virtual reality, sports science etc. Most existing inertial/magnetic systems used for body motion tracking today come with wiring which restrains the natural movement. In this paper, a wearable wireless sensor network using accelerometers has been developed for monitoring the human motion. The wireless feature of our system allows for unrestrained movements and improves the usability of the system. Moreover, the use of lightweight sensor nodes makes it easy for attachment to the limbs and poses little hindrance to natural movements. The developed system is also portable and low in cost compared to sophisticated visual tracking systems utilizing multiple cameras. The low power consumption of the sensor nodes also makes it suitable for long term monitoring. A prototype has been developed and experimental results show that the system has reasonable performance.