A Self-Powered Wearable Body Sensor Network System for Safety Applications

Monitoring of environmental conditions has become increasingly crucial because poor environments can lead to severe health issues. This paper presents a self-powered wearable sensor network for safety applications. The system includes a maximum power point control (MPPT) solar energy harvesting unit, multiple low power environmental sensing sensor nodes, and wireless modules based on LoRa. The experimental results show that the MPPT unit can harvest solar energy and enable a continuous energy supply for a sensor node on the body. The wearable sensor node is able to monitor the surrounding temperature, relative humidity, and ultraviolet (UV) index. The data is transmitted to a gateway via a LoRa network. The data is finally stored into a cloud server via the Internet connection.