Improving energy-efficiency of real-time health monitoring using wireless sensors and smartphones

Abstract

The emergence of wireless technologies and powerful mobile devices has opened up opportunities for real-time remote health monitoring. Smartphones, equipped with wireless connectivity features and powerful processing capabilities, are usually utilized as a data aggregation, transmission and communication nodes. However, the main challenge of unobtrusive continuous sensing remains fast battery depletion of wireless sensor nodes and smartphones. In this paper, we have introduced wireless sensor network system with multimodal platform for physiological monitoring and smartphone for subsequent processing. Possible distribution of processing operations for wireless sensor node and smartphone device is demonstrated in stress detection scenario. Event-driven approach based on Bluetooth Low Energy communication protocol for data transfer between sensor board and smartphone shows significant savings in power consumption, while maintaining satisfying level of accuracy. This proves to be of high importance, in order to improve systems reliability and user acceptance in other real-time health monitoring scenarios.