Prototype of a secure wireless patient monitoring system for the medical community

Abstract

Many medical applications set new demands on sensor network designs. They often involve highly variable data rates, multiple receivers and security. Most existing sensor network designs do not adequately support these requirements, focusing instead on aggregating small amounts of data from nodes without security. In this paper, we present a software design for medical sensor networks. This framework provides a set of protocols and services specifically tailored for this application domain. It includes a secure communications model, an interface for periodic collection of sensor data, a dynamic sensor discovery protocol and protocols that monitor and save up to 70% of the energy of a node. The framework is built in TinyOS and a JAVA based user interface is provided to debug the framework and display the measured data. An extensive evaluation of the framework of a 6-node sensor test-bed is presented, measuring scalability and robustness as the number of sensors and the per node data rate are varied. The results show that the proposed framework is a scalable, robust, reliable and secure solution for medical applications.