An open and modular hardware node for wireless body area networks

Health monitoring is nowadays one of the most im-portant markets due to the increasing interest in prevention andtreatment of physical problems. In this context the developmentof wearable, wireless, open source and non-intrusive sensingsolutions is still an open problem. Indeed most of the existingcommercial architectures are closed and provide little flexibility.An open hardware architecture for the design of a modularwireless sensor node for health monitoring is proposed in thispaper. Dividing the connection and sensing functions in twoseparate boards, compliant to the IEEE1451 standard, we addplug and play capabilities to analog transducers. Furthermore,we propose an open hardware wireless body area networksolution with fall detection and health monitoring capabilities.