Reconfigurable differentiall accelerometer platform for inertial body sensor networks

This work presents a design of a reconfigurable differential accelerometer platform for body sensor networks (BSNs) that achieves lower power and lower cost than traditional inertial sensor systems. The proposed reconfigurable platform provides six degree-of-freedom (6DoF) sensing with four tri-axial accelerometers, entirely avoiding gyroscopes, which have become a bottleneck of power and cost optimization for many BSNs. Gryo-free 6DoF sensing has been demonstrated in the past but not under BSN form factor constraints. The proposed platform includes three components: (1) differential accelerometers in a BSN-compatible configuration, (2) a reconfigurable analog circuit for adaptive sensor conditioning given this configuration, and (3) a signal reconstruction algorithm based on prior knowledge about body motions. Simulated results demonstrate accurate angular velocity estimation using the proposed platform.