Abstract
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) systems demand is raising. The use of bed seat occupancy sensors is imperative for this kind of ubiquitous monitoring systems. Pressure mats are a first way to solve this feature, but several environmental dependencies make them weak to be an efficient and reliable solution for large volume deployments. Solutions based on force-to-resistor transducer seems to imply a too high power consumption to be integrated on wireless sensor nodes. A force-capacitive transducer based sensor has been proposed, implemented and tested in this paper. This sensor, based on Electro-Mechanical Films (EMFi) is able to detect force variations in a quasi-passive way. This detection is used to trigger an active mechanism to measure the weight by means of the transducer capacity. A low-power wireless sensor node prototype including this new sensor has been assembled and tested with a wide range of weights. The occupancy detection was successful and the power consumption of the node was increased at less that a 15%.
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Fernandez-Luque, F., Zapata, J., Ruiz, R. (2011). Low-Power Bed Seat Occupancy Sensor Based on EMFi. In: Ferrández, J.M., Álvarez Sánchez, J.R., de la Paz, F., Toledo, F.J. (eds) Foundations on Natural and Artificial Computation. IWINAC 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6686. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21344-1_52
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21344-1_52
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