Wireless Body Area Network for Hip Rehabilitation System

In Wearable Well-Being project PUHVI, HipGuard system for patients recovering from hip surgery was developed. Novel wireless sensors having 3-axis acceleration and 3-axis magnetic sensors are used to measure patient’s hip and leg position and rotation. Furthermore, capacitive insole sensors are used to measure the force between foot and a shoe. This paper concentrates on how these sensors can be interconnected to a central unit that collects and analyzes the measured information. Body Area Network (BAN) utilized in wearable healtcare application have several application-specific challenges such as low-power operation, low latency data transfer, high system reliability and autonomous network operation. This paper thoroughly analyzes how ANT wireless sensor networking technology operates as BAN – the focus is mainly on energy efficiency, communication latency, network size and reliability issues. Because the main focus of this paper is particularly in the operability of ANT networking, these results can be directly utilized in many other wireless sensor networking applications.