Co-Design Concepts and Subsystem Oriented Development for Academic BSN Platforms

Body-worn sensor system design is a promising field of study promoted by emerging interest in longterm, longitudinal monitoring of health-based metrics in the medical and personal fitness contexts. As sensing and reporting modalities diversify, so do the challenges and opportunities faced by traditional embedded designers in developing and producing systems incorporating them. This work aims to significantly alleviate the time-to-prototype and design for novel platform-oriented research utilizing
emerging sensing and reporting modalities. The primary contribution is the next generation of the TEMPO core sampling and storage platform in a wearable, expandable, and longitudinally-deployable form-factor. The TEMPO 4 node is designed to serve as a single-board, six or nine degree-of-freedom inertial motion-capture unit as well as an open development platform featuring an easy to interface 16-pin hardware extension port. The general contributions include hardware-firmware-application layer codesign principles and analysis of commercial-off-the-shelf products and protocols for the ultra-low power body-worn sensing context.