Development Of A Wearable Human Posture And Health Monitoring System Based On Wireless Sensor Networks

With the aggravation of aging society problem, people are increasingly paying attention to health of the elderly, it is socially important to monitor daily posture and physiological information of the elderly and evaluate their health condition. Wearable technology, which is used to monitor the health of the elderly and dynamically acquires the physiological signal with low-physical and mental load, has become a hot research field of medical care domain. New-style wearable medical monitor has important practical value in fields such as daily health inspection of the elderly, rehabilitation of patients etc., and will be an important kind of medical equipment for health monitoring, diagnosing and health care in the new medical model. Nowadays, while fruitful research results have achieved in health care domain abroad, domestic research has just been started. With the enhancement of family health care consciousnesses, Wearable health monitoring technology has broad application prospects.This paper designed a Wearable Human Posture and Health Monitoring Platform Based on Wireless Sensor Networks, which can detect and display human posture and physiological information in real-time. The study work of this thesis includes the following aspects:1. Basic concepts of wireless sensor network are introduced and each layer's functions of ZigBee 2006 protocol stack are detailedly analyzed, then project needs analysis is conducted and the overall framework of monitoring system is proposed based on those groundworks. The system is composed of wearable-node (four sub-nodes and one coordinator node) and PC interaction interface. Wearable-nodes, which are worn in the different parts of the body, detect acceleration information and transmit the collected data to PC through wireless sensor network, then algorithm is processed in the PC, body posture and heart rate are detected in real-time and gait movement is traced.2. Hardware circuit of sensor node is designed combined with the project requirements. SOC single chip design concept is adopted to reduce size of the node. To extend working life of the node, low-power chips are selected and energy-saving circuit is designed. To improve the stability of RF communication, inverted F-style PCB loop antenna is designed base on microstrip line theory.3. System software of health care, composed of lower monitor part and host PC part, is designed. Lower monitor software is mainly responsible for sampling human acceleration information, constructing communication platform using frequency division multiplexing method and ZigBee 2006 protocol, collecting and transmitting data from child node to coordinator. Host PC software realizes the posture/heart rate detection and gait tracking algorithms, receives and processes acceleration data. Also, Human-machine interface is designed to display acceleration waveform and posture/heart rate information in real-time.Experiments show that this monitoring system can detect body posture/heart rate information in real-time, trace gait movement accurately and realizes the health monitoring function in a better way. Also, this system has the advantages of small-size, low-power consumption, high accuracy, good extension, cost-effective, and can be used in the domains such as the elderly activity detection, health care etc..