Networked body sensing: Enabling real-time decisions in health and defence applications

This paper presents the application scenario, conceptual overview and implementation of a monitoring system targeted at monitoring EOD suit wearers during missions. The system's aim is to deliver prediction of heat stress risk in the operative and provide actuation of a cooling system integrated within the suit. Prior work established that such prediction requires real-time autonomous processing of skin temperature and body acceleration data, and thus a system implementation is presented based on two interacting subsystems that perform the required sensing and data processing. Posture classification is performed with an accuracy of 96.1%, and a heat stress prediction algorithm is demonstrated with an overall accuracy of 88.5% when predicting the occurrence of heat stress within the next 2 minutes.