Wireless Sensor Data Collection based on ZigBee Communication

This paper presents a comparison of different configurations of a wireless sensor system for capturing human motion. The systems consist of sensor elements which wirelessly transfers motion data to a receiver element. The sensor elements consist of a microcontroller, accelerometer(s) and a radio transceiver. The receiver element consists of a radio receiver connected through a microcontroller to a computer for real time sound synthesis. The wireless transmission between the sensor elements and the receiver element is based on the low rate IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee standard. A configuration with several accelerometers connected by wire to a wireless sensor element is compared to using multiple wireless sensor elements with only one accelerometer in each. The study shows that it would be feasable to connect 5-6 accelerometers in the given setups. Sensor data processing can be done in either the receiver element or in the sensor element. For various reasons it can be reasonable to implement some sensor data processing in the sensor element. The paper also looks at how much time that typically would be needed for a simple pre-processing task.