Low-powered wearable motion detecting system using static electric fields

Abstract

Recently, the commercial market has seen an increase in the availability of smart wearable Internet of things (IoT) devices (wearables) including such items as: smart shoes, smart watches, wrist bands, and pendants. Many of these devices are part of the human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems. In this research, the authors have designed and developed an embedded sensory IoT system with a low-power Bluetooth communication module to collect body single node voltage using a smartphone. Their approach for sensing the user's movement builds on work in the electric field sensing. Experimentation and verification have been conducted on a group of test subjects with different test scenarios including remaining at rest, walking, jumping, running, hand waving, eating, and bending over. They designed and developed their sensor to detect body motion data, and then used their algorithm to analyse the collected data. This study introduces the use of signal processing techniques for sensor data analytics to detect human body motion. The system can detect activity with a high degree of accuracy (∼ 87%).