SPHERE: Wireless Communications & Sensoring for E-Healthcare

Project Title	Wireless Communications and Sensoring for E-Healthcare (SPHERE)
Date	01 January 2000 - Present
Funder	EPSRC
Contact person	Dr Robert Piechocki
Website	Sphere
Links	Partners

This project will develop a robust, energy efficient and user acceptable wireless communication system and devices. The system will consist of on-body wearable sensor nodes which communicate wirelessly with an in-house network of access points providing real-time information about physical activity and localisation of the user. The wearable device will be small in size and use energy harvesting components as the main source of energy. 

By monitoring long term activity patters, and especially deviations from routines, it is possible to infer changes in underlying health conditions. The functionally of such wearable devices, and also user acceptance issues are directly related to the battery lifetime and sensor size. Wireless communication is the largest consumer of the scarce energy resources available to the sensor. This project will develop novel low power communications techniques, interference mitigation strategies, antennas, and on-node signal processing which do not require on board batteries and are specifically optimised for the use with energy harvesting.