A Body Sensor Network (BSN) is a system made up of low-power sensor nodes that monitor the wearer’s body and surroundings. BSNs have emerged as a prominent technology, largely influenced by the increased health consciousness, widespread availability of wireless-enabled consumer electronics, and growing wireless connectivity infrastructure. In this paper, we present an extensible, cloud-connected BSN platform leveraging lightweight, efficient compression and encryption techniques suitable for edge computing. The platform includes a tunable wavelet-based compression algorithm, suitable for biosignal compression, a lightweight, secure block cipher (SPARX) to encrypt data during transmission, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) connectivity via Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). We utilize this platform to evaluate the benefits of compressing sensor data by comparing the delay, power, and energy efficiency on the BSN platform when transmitting encrypted data to the cloud. The tunable compression algorithm efficiently reduces the size of transmitted packets on diverse types of sensor data, with low reconstruction error. When paired with a lightweight block cipher, the combination enables improvements in energy consumption (38%) and energy efficiency (58%) when compared to encryption alone.