Sensor Hardware Development

Description

Wearable sensors are an important tool in sports. They can provide individualised feedback during training sessions, give feedback to athletes, and improve their personal health status. Common to all applications is to measure physiological data or biomechanical motion data. Therefore, in this project we develop wearable, small and lightweight low power sensor systems that allow long-term monitoring of physical quantities while maintaining high sampling rates and long runtimes. These system can be integrated into clothing or sports equipment without affecting the athlete’s performance and behaviour.

The first device is a new sensor system based on available low power components. It contains an magnetic-inertial measurement unit (mIMU) including a 3-dimensional accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. Furthermore, temperature and barometric sensing were added. The core is a powerful ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with on-node processing capabilities. The system is powered by a small lithium-polymer battery which provides long runtime and is monitored by a special fuel gauge. A high precision real time clock enables a constant sampling rate and synchronises multiple sensors by supplying an exact global time. These are important features to allow sophisticated signal processing algorithms to be used on highly dynamic sports motions. All parts are mechanically combined in a plastic enclosure, which has similar dimensions of present wearable monitoring systems. This enables fast and easy sensor integration into clothing and sports equipment.

Further developments:

⇒  wireless power transmission link to enable contactless charging of the battery

⇒  wireless communication link to enable wireless data transmission using low power standards

Publications