Wireless body area network devices for healthcare monitoring

Abstract

Wireless respiratory detection is one of the most challenging aspects of human body monitoring, and yet at the same time, it holds one of the most important information of a faltering individual.

Therefore, this project presents a wireless sensing device for human respiratory and orientation detection. A combination of the tri-axial accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors were chosen to detect the angular rotation of a human body’s torso during respiration. The measurement data from the sensor is interfaced, processed and finally displayed through a GUI for analysis and evaluation. In addition to angular detection, the sensing device also allows full 360° orientation detection which is presented in the form of a 3-dimensional display.

Through experimental analysis and results, it showed that data processing was vital to the detection of the minute angular changes in the human’s torso during respiration. However, due to the nature of forces, linear movements of the body can easily corrupt these breathing induced angular changes which then corrupts the measurement data. One feasible solution to this is, to use additional sensors dedicated to detect the linear movements. These linear measurements can then be used to offset the corrupted angular measurements. However, this was not implemented in this project due to the time and budget constraints.

Nevertheless, the sensor device created has showed its feasibility for the detection of human respiration and paved the way for future developments in this field of research.