Power-Management Strategies in sEMG Wireless Body Sensor Networks Based on Computation Allocations: A Case Study for Fatigue Assessments

Surface ElectroMyoGraphy (sEMG) is widely applied to a variety of applications. Managing the power consumption of battery-constrained sEMG Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSN) is an important topic. In this paper, we use fatigue assessments as a case study. We apply the concept of distributed computing to explore the impact of computation allocations on the client power consumption and the requirement of architecture specifications. Regarding the CPU clock rate, we propose a power-saving method based on the ping-pong buffer mechanism and evaluate all the crucial factors which affect the power consumption such as sEMG sample rates, algorithmic computational costs, wireless throughputs, and selection of wireless technologies. To sum up, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of all possible distributed computing architectures of WBSN to determine the lowest-power WBSN architecture. The results show that the implementation based on the lowest-power WBSN architecture has lower power consumption compared with other hardwares. The average current of the proposed architecture can be reduced by 81.7% compared with the previous work. Besides, the battery life is 4.48 times that of the previous work under the continuous wireless connection equipped with the same 300mAh lithium battery. Compared with the commercial device, the battery life is 1.6 times that of the commercial one.