KNOWME: a case study in wireless body area sensor network design

Wireless body area sensing networks have the potential to revolutionize health care in the near term. The coupling of biosensors with a wireless infrastructure enables the real-time monitoring of an individual's health and related behaviors continuously, as well as the provision of realtime feedback with nimble, adaptive, and personalized interventions. The KNOWME platform is reviewed, and lessons learned from system integration, optimization, and in-field deployment are provided. KNOWME is an endto- end body area sensing system that integrates off-the-shelf sensors with a Nokia N95 mobile phone to continuously monitor and analyze the biometric signals of a subject. KNOWME development by an interdisciplinary team and in-laboratory, as well as in-field deployment studies, employing pediatric obesity as a case study condition to monitor and evaluate physical activity, have revealed four major challenges: (1) achieving robustness to highly varying operating environments due to subject-induced variability such as mobility or sensor placement, (2) balancing the tension between acquiring high fidelity data and minimizing network energy consumption, (3) enabling accurate physical activity detection using a modest number of sensors, and (4) designing WBANs to determine physiological quantities of interest such as energy expenditure. The KNOWME platform described in this article directly addresses these challenges.