Power saving in a biomechanical sensor network using activity detection

Wearable accelerometers are used for biomechanical activity monitoring in a variety of applications. In this paper, a power-saving method is proposed in which the wearer's activity is detected, and the sampling rate of the device is adjusted based on this activity. Simplified algorithms are presented for activity detection, which are then implemented on practical sensor networking hardware. Simulations and experiments are presented which illustrate the potential power savings of this method.