France's CEA-Leti is coordinating a multi-partner project called Cormoran that aims to use wireless body area networks (WBANs) to coordinate the navigation of groups in buildings or large-scale motion capture for gaming, sports and healthcare.
WBANs consist of wearable sensors or devices and are already being commercialized in markets such as security, rescue, health, gaming and intelligent clothing. "If deployed in very large segments of the population, they might eventually be a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT) and form the skeleton of future distributed cooperative communication networks for mobile-device users," said Leti, an institute of French research-and-technology organization CEA.
The Cormoran project, funded by the French National Research Agency, is investigating new mechanisms that would allow WBANs to work more efficiently at the body scale, while also interacting and cooperating with other similar networks to provide independent radiolocation measurements. "The coexistence of groups of equipped users can cause radio interference, but it is also a beneficial source of information redundancy and/or diversity through cooperation," said Leti.
Project partners are researching low-data rate and low-power wireless technologies, including impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) or narrow-band radio systems such as ZigBee and Bluetooth-low energy that are centered on 2.4 GHz.
The Cormoran consortium includes four research laboratories: CEA-Leti (coordinator), INSA de Lyon-CITI, ISIC Telecom ParisTech–LINCS and University of Rennes 1-IETR.
For more:
- see this CEA-Leti release
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