Building a real-world body area sensor network system

With the rapid advances of wearable sensors and wireless networks. There is a growing research interest in building Body Area Sensor Network (BSN) systems to support applications such as human activity recognition and daily health monitoring. The main challenges of building a BSN system include: First, the wearable sensor nodes are highly constrained in resources; Second, the sensor nodes are prong to failures; Third, the applications requires the sensors to work with high sampling rate which results in the heavy load on each sensor node. Beside the technical challenges, the usability of the system is also a critical issue when deployed into the the real-world environment.We present in this paper the lessons we learnt while building a real-world BSN system which aims at supporting real-time human activity recognition. We analyzed the challenges and problems in depth and proposed possible solutions. The conclusions we made in this paper can serve as the guidelines for building a BSN system in the future.