Evaluation of a Multi-Tier Heterogeneous Sensor Network for Patient Monitoring

Abstract

In this paper we propose and evaluate a wireless sensor network (WSN) system in order to improve an existing patient-monitoring and surveillance system at the cardiologic intensive care unit (CICU) of a large university clinic (Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Hubert Koutoukou Maga - CHU-HKM) in Cotonou city of Benin (a West-African country). We have designed a multi-tier architecture and simulated a heterogeneous, autonomous, and energy efficient wireless sensor network system to overcome issues faced by existing patient monitoring system in CICU such as manual collection and processing of data. The improvement of the patient monitoring system has the objectives of providing affordable and better health care service provision as well as autonomous and automatic collection and processing of patient's bio-signals and environmental data. The proposed Wireless Sensor Network consists of wireless heterogeneous nodes which sense patient bio-signals, measure environmental parameters in the hospitalization rooms such as ambient temperature, quality of air and send collected data to a gateway (central node) for processing and storage. The conducted simulation experiments show that the proposed sensor network architecture which uses ZigBee wireless standard and protocol highly improves the patience monitoring and surveillance experience at CICU. It promotes collection and autonomous processing of patient physiological data and room ambient temperature data. Incorporating such system in CICU will be highly beneficial for taking a correct decision during treatment. Beyond the accuracy and quality of the collected medical data, proposed WSN is also designed to reduce the energy consumption within the sensor network system.