Advanced Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSN) for Performance Monitoring in Sports

Nadia Khaled, Swiss Federal Institiute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL)

Abstract: The achievement of high-level athletic performance is increasingly associated to careful monitoring of all key metabolic and physiological functions, both during the effort and during the recuperation phases. Such key metabolic and physiological functions include, but are not limited to, heart and respiratory rates, blood oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, glucose and lactate concentrations in the blood. To acquire and monitor these metabolic functions in a non-intrusive fashion and in realistic outdoor training and competition set-ups, it is desirable to design innovative, low-weight, movement-artifact-resistant and autonomous wearable personal health (monitoring) systems. Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSN) have recently emerged as a promising common architecture and technology for such personal health systems. More specifically, a WBSN consists of a number of sensor nodes attached to the body. Each WBSN node ensures the accurate sensing and capture of its target physiological data, its (pre-) processing and wireless communication to the wearable Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), which acts as the network coordinator and central data collector. This PDA will be responsible for the storage, organization, complementary analysis and fusion of the collected physiological and metabolic information, its user-friendly representation, and its dissemination to the relevant medical staff or central monitoring service through private and/or public wireless access networks.

Within our Center SI project, we have investigated the design of such an advanced personal health monitoring system based on WBSN technology. In particular, we have carried out activities along 3 research lines: (1) Energy-efficient medium access control solutions with QoS provision; (2) Efficient biomedical algorithms for embedded sensor nodes; (2); (3) An optimized processing platform for biomedical sensor nodes. In this talk, we will overview the key challenges of these three research lines as well as present the project's main achievements.


About the speaker: Nadia Khaled received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France, in 2000, and the Ph. D. in applied sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 2005. From 2000 to 2005, she was with the wireless research group of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center (IMEC), Leuven, Belgium. From 2005 to 2006, she was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Since 2006, she has been a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL, and has been holding the position of visiting assistant professor at the University of Carlos III Madrid (UC3M). Her research interests lie in the areas of signal processing for wireless communications, and energy-aware wireless body sensor networks. As of January 2010, Nadia is leading a NESTLE-EPFL project on non-intrusive, intelligent and wearable sensors to help monitoring the health, well-being and nutrition of elderly people.