Human Motion Tracking With Wireless Wearable Sensor Network: Experience and Lessons

Abstract

Wireless wearable sensor networks have emerged as a promising technique for human motion tracking due to the flexibility and scalability. In such system several wireless sensor nodes being attached to human limb construct a wearable sensor network, where each sensor node including MEMS sensors (such as 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis magnetometer and 3-axis gyroscope) monitors the limb orientation and transmits these information to the base station for reconstruction via low-power wireless communication technique. Due to the energy constraint, the high fidelity requirement for real time rendering of human motion and tiny operating system embedded in each sensor node adds more challenges for the system implementation. In this paper, we discuss such challenges and experiences in detail during the implementation of such system with wireless wearable sensor network which includes COTS wireless sensor nodes (Imote 2) and uses TinyOS 1.x in each sensor node. Since our system uses the COTS sensor nodes and popular tiny operating system, it might be helpful for further exploration in such field.