New-Tech Europe | Oct 2016 | Special Edition For Electronica 2016

Figure 1. low power siliconlabs

their behaviour. GPS-enabled sports watches are already in widespread use by athletes, amateur and professional alike. The same IoT technology proposed for medical sensors can be used to prevent injury, such as damage to knees caused by bad running posture, through the use of accelerometers worn on the legs, perhaps sewn into a pair of leggings. Similar sensors incorporated in a vest could help prevent the poor posture that leads to back pain. In these cases, exercise programs in a smartphone or tablet would advise interactively on better ways to run or sit and warn the user that they are slipping into bad habits when they lose concentration. The sensors used for wellness need not be entirely wearable. For people suffering from debilitating conditions such as dementia that threaten to remove their ability to live independently, sensors and displays placed around the home can help them. The sensors detect what kinds of activities the occupant is trying to perform and can present reminders and help on the displays as they move

sensors would be used to monitor vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate, in the case of patients who have suffered congestive heart failure or are considered high risk for a heart attack. If a patient has had a stroke or is suffering from mobility issues either leading up to or post hip-replacement surgery, accelerometers and similar motion sensors can be deployed around the body to ensure they are moving well and also to alert emergency services if they suffer a fall. Researchers have also found that in the case of rehabilitation, they get a better sense of the effective mobility of a patient if they can determine how well a patient climbs and descends stairs and gets out of a chair rather than simply walking across a doctor’s surgery. Wearable IoT goes far beyond treatment of medical conditions. It can help reduce injury and boost wellness. People who wear simple exercise-monitoring wristbands find that working out how many steps they have taken that day changes

around their home. The unifying theme behind these different applications is that of intelligent sensor fusion. Smart sensors wirelessly relay data about changes in circumstance to a monitoring unit which assimilates the incoming information and makes decisions on what to do next. For example, a sudden change in heart rate flagged by one sensor may simply be through additional exertion. But if accompanied by difficulty breathing picked up by another sensor may trigger the monitoring unit to send an alarm to a nearby medical specialist over the cellular connection of a mobile phone. The key component technologies therefore are low-power microcontrollers and sensors that either have built-in wireless support or can communicate with low-power RF devices that are able to fit in a compact package. The key wireless technologies for wearable and smart- home applications are Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and ZigBee. Both are designed for low-energy

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