A robust wearable u-healthcare platform in wireless sensor network

Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is considered to be one of the most important research fields for ubiquitous healthcare (u-healthcare) applications. Healthcare systems combined with WSNs have only been introduced by several pioneering researchers. However, most researchers collect physiological data from medical nodes located at static locations and transmit them within a limited communication range between a base station and the medical nodes. In these healthcare systems, the network link can be easily broken owing to the movement of the object nodes. To overcome this issue, in this study, the fast link exchange minimum cost forwarding (FLE-MCF) routing protocol is proposed. This protocol allows real-time multi-hop communication in a healthcare system based on WSN. The protocol is designed for a multi-hop sensor network to rapidly restore the network link when it is broken. The performance of the proposed FLE-MCF protocol is compared with that of a modified minimum cost forwarding (MMCF) protocol. The FLE-MCF protocol shows a good packet delivery rate from/to a fast moving object in a WSN. The designed wearable platform utilizes an adaptive linear prediction filter to reduce the motion artifacts in the original electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. Two filter algorithms used for baseline drift removal are evaluated to check whether real-time execution is possible on our wearable platform. The experiment results shows that the ECG signal filtered by adaptive linear prediction filter recovers from the distorted ECG signal efficiently.