A Wireless Body Sensor Network for Activity Monitoring with Low Transmission Overhead

Activity recognition has been a research field of high interest over the last years, and it finds application in the medical domain, as well as personal healthcare monitoring during daily home- and sports-activities. With the aim of producing minimum discomfort while performing supervision of subjects, miniaturized networks of low-power wireless nodes are typically deployed on the body to gather and transmit physiological data, thus forming a Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN). In this work, we propose a WBSN for online activity monitoring, which combines the sensing capabilities of wearable nodes and the high computational resources of modern smart phones. The proposed solution provides different tradeoffs between classification accuracy and energy consumption, thanks to different workloads assigned to the nodes and to the mobile phone in different network configurations. In particular, our WBSN is able to achieve very high activity recognition accuracies (up to 97.2%) on multiple subjects, while significantly reducing the sampling frequency and the volume of transmitted data with respect to other state-of-the-art solutions.