Experiments in Adaptive Power Control for Truly Wearable Biomedical Sensor Devices

Abstract

Emerging body-wearable devices for continuous health monitoring are severely energy constrained and yet required to offer high communication reliability under fluctuating channel conditions. Such devices require very careful management of their energy resources in order to prolong their lifetime. In our earlier work we had proposed dynamic power control as a means of saving precious energy in off the-shelf sensor devices. In this work we experiment with a real body-wearable device to assess the power savings possible in a realistic setting. We quantify the power consumption against the packet loss and establish the feasibility of dynamic power control for saving energy in a truly-body-wearable setting.