Abstract
Wireless body sensor network (WBSN) enables a new generation of motion capture systems for applications such as rehabilitation, fitness, or gaming. However, the body might obstruct the transmission of wireless signals, which significantly reduces the transmission success rate and thus degrades the quality of motion reconstruction. This thesis proves that deploying a single sink device cannot avoid such body fading effect. There are various ways to solving this problem. In this thesis, we focus on solutions that do not incur extra energy consumption in the sensor nodes in order to sustain the lifetime of the system. We consider the type of applications in which user movements are confined within a fixed region and their intended motions are known, e.g. rehabilitation exercises. The above problem can be solved by placing multiple sink devices around the user to collect the sensed data. This sink placement problem can be modeled as a coverage problem in 3D space, and we propose a heuristic algorithm to determine the minimum number and placement of the sink devices. Experimental results demonstrate that the average transmission success rate of our system reaches almost 100%.