Critical time parameters for evaluation of body area Wireless Sensor Networks in a Healthcare Monitoring Application

Abstract

In recent years, the drive for the Healthcare Monitoring Application (HMA) aims to provide continuous remote monitoring of a patient's health. For this to happen, the sensors in the monitoring component of the Body Area Wireless Sensor Networks (BAWSN) need to continuously send data to a Healthcare Application. We show that to provide continuous health data, the BAWSN depends on the collective data delivered by all the sensor nodes and not on a single sensor because medical diagnosis is rarely performed from a single data point. In addition, the arrival time of data should occur within the expected time to be indicative of the actual health of the patient. In this paper, we characterize the HMA as a time-critical application because the BAWSN has stringent timing requirements concerning the arrival of data from the sensor nodes within the defined critical time. Thereby, we formulate the critical time parameters to evaluate the BAWSN operations.