A Wearable Wireless Sensor Node for Body Fall Detection

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are commonly considered as a key enabling technology for ambient assisted living (AAL) and smart home services. Essential requirements for this kind of applications are: small node size, long lifetime, little invasiveness and reliable communication over a range of few tens of meters even in presence of obstacles. For this reason, in this paper a low-cost WSN node architecture for body fall detection is presented. Our node is partially inspired to the well-known TelosB/Tmote Sky so as to maintain full software compatibility with TinyOS, but it is highly optimized in size, it is equipped with a chip antenna with better performance than the typical inverted-F printed one and it is powered by a compact high-capacity lithium-ion polymer rechargeable battery. Several experimental results confirm that the node lifetime may exceed one week of operation in the expected working conditions.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are commonly considered as a key enabling technology for ambient assisted living (AAL) and smart home services. Essential requirements for this kind of applications are: small node size, long lifetime, little invasiveness and reliable communication over a range of few tens of meters even in presence of obstacles. For this reason, in this paper a low-cost WSN node architecture for body fall detection is presented. Our node is partially inspired to the well-known TelosB/Tmote Sky so as to maintain full software compatibility with TinyOS, but it is highly optimized in size, it is equipped with a chip antenna with better performance than the typical inverted-F printed one and it is powered by a compact high-capacity lithium-ion polymer rechargeable battery. Several experimental results confirm that the node lifetime may exceed one week of operation in the expected working conditions. © 2011 IEEE.