Poster Abstract: Packet Delivery Performance for On-Body Mica2dot Wireless Sensor Networks

Wearable computing continues to attract researchers’ interests. In particular, the combination of biomedical applications and sensor networks has been in major focus, especially in the field of real-time health care monitoring. Various connection mediums have been proposed for such platforms. This includes wired and wireless communication schemes. The inconvenience of interconnecting sensors through wires, however, not only induces high maintenance costs, but also may limits the freedom of human activity. Utilizing wireless biosensors nodes removes such unnatural wire constraints. Yet, employing wireless sensors in the close proximity to the human body may introduce a new set of limitations. The goal of this work is to study how the human body affects the quality of the wireless links between nodes. Unlike wire connections, wireless connections are unstable and vulnerable to noise from environment. Throughout our experiments, we attach sensor nodes to different parts of the body and monitor the packet reception rate between various nodes. We envision that the experimental results can be used to assist designers construct reliable and efficient wireless wearable computing setups for related biomedical studies. Index Terms – Sensor Networks, Wearable Computing.