Energy Saving Mechanism for a Smart Wearable System: Monitoring Infants during the Sleep

In Smart Wearable Systems (SWS), the wearable devices are powered by batteries with very limited energy available. These emergent systems have strong Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, with focus on reliable communication and low power consumption. This is the scope of the Baby Night Watch, a project developed in the context of the European Texas Instruments Innovation Challenge (TIIC) 2015. This Project consists of a monitoring tool for infants, which matches different emergent research fields. SWSs require energy saving mechanism to reduce the energy wasting during wireless communications. A Transmission Power Control (TPC) mechanism that changes its characteristics according to the scenario of operation, is proposed. It uses sensors to determine the position of the infant and, based on that, predicts the current state of the channel. Other TPC algorithms are implemented and their performance are compared with our novel mechanism. The proposed TPC mechanism outperforms the existing ones in terms of the energy saving.