Continuous health condition monitoring by 24×7 sensing and transmission of physiological data over 5-G cellular channels

Abstract

A novel architecture tested exclusively for instantaneous sensing and 24×7 transmitting important physiological signals over cellular networks has been introduced in this paper. Pulmonary Artery Pressure (PAP) and Electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG) are selected as two preliminary physiological signals for this exercise as these two can help diagnose Cardio-Vascular Diseases (CVDs), the major silent killer of modern days. We use a Wireless Body Area Sensor Network to get the physiological data from a user's body and transmit them to a WBAN coordinator. The coordinator compresses received data from the body sensors, modulates it using bi-phase modulation scheme and sends it to a GSM module for remote transmission over existing cellular network. The GSM module receives the data and sends it to a remotely located tiny server for subsequent demodulation and reconstruction of the original signals. We explain details of different techniques used for data compression of this methodology and provide efficient transmission of data considering allowable range of perturbation in the information content in maintaining original characteristics. For the transmission of physiological data, we visualize to have a dedicated channel in upcoming fifth generation mobile technology, as more bandwidth for everybody is anticipated for services like data on demand, and would make 24×7 health-monitoring a reality in the near future. The novelty of our approach lies in the fact that it would enable online, round-the-clock health watch for the cellular system subscribers at very low power consumption by collaborating with the underlying sensor networks.