Body Sensor Network based on Soft Polymer Sensors and Wireless Communications

Abstract

Wireless communications is now completely pervasive, and already is used in many guises by people in everyday life. However until now, the information exchanged has been mainly standard electronic forms of standard data such as text, images, video. More recently, attention has been increasingly focused on sensor-based data, which presents rich new areas for applications and research, particularly in the area of life-logging applications. Thus, focus must shift to developing new and novel sensor layers to bridge this interface between the real world of the body and the digital world of communications. The easiest means to do this is with wearable sensors, but this in turn raises the issue of ‘comfortable’ body monitoring systems. If the “wearable” device is uncomfortable then user compliance will be greatly compromised. At present many conventional sensors are unsuitable for wearable body monitoring devices, however, in this paper, we present a prototype wearable device which was used and compared to an established non-wearable method for monitoring breathing frequency.