Context aware power management for motion-sensing body area network nodes

Abstract

Body Area Networks (BANs) are widely used mainly for healthcare and fitness purposes. In both cases, the lifetime of sensor nodes included in the BAN is a key aspect that may affect the functionality of the whole system. Typical approaches to power management are based on a trade-off between the data rate and the monitoring time. Our work introduces a power management layer capable to opportunistically use data sampled by sensors to detect contextual information such as user activity and adapt the node operating point accordingly. The use of this layer has been demonstrated on a commercial sensor node, increasing its battery lifetime up to a factor of 5.