Anomaly Detection in Medical Wireless Sensor Networks using SVM and Linear Regression Models

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This paper details the architecture and describes the preliminary experimentation with the proposed framework for anomaly detection in medical wireless body area networks for ubiquitous patient and healthcare monitoring. The architecture integrates novel data mining and machine learning algorithms with modern sensor fusion techniques. Knowing wireless sensor networks are prone to failures resulting from their limitations (i.e. limited energy resources and computational power), using this framework, the authors can distinguish between irregular variations in the physiological parameters of the monitored patient and faulty sensor data, to ensure reliable operations and real time global monitoring from smart devices. Sensor nodes are used to measure characteristics of the patient and the sensed data is stored on the local processing unit. Authorized users may access this patient data remotely as long as they maintain connectivity with their application enabled smart device. Anomalous or faulty measurement data resulting from damaged sensor nodes or caused by malicious external parties may lead to misdiagnosis or even death for patients. The authors' application uses a Support Vector Machine to classify abnormal instances in the incoming sensor data. If found, the authors apply a periodically rebuilt, regressive prediction model to the abnormal instance and determine if the patient is entering a critical state or if a sensor is reporting faulty readings. Using real patient data in our experiments, the results validate the robustness of our proposed framework. The authors further discuss the experimental analysis with the proposed approach which shows that it is quickly able to identify sensor anomalies and compared with several other algorithms, it maintains a higher true positive and lower false negative rate.