Abstract
Recent technological advances in wireless communications and wireless sensor networks have enabled the design of low-cost, intelligent, tiny, and lightweight medical sensor nodes that can be strategically placed on human body, create a wireless body area network (WBAN) to monitor various physiological vital signs for a long period of time and providing real-time feedback to the user and medical staff. WBANs promise to revolutionize health monitoring. In this paper, medical sensors were used to collect physiological data from patients and transmit it to Intelligent Personal digital Assistant (IPDA) using ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4 standard and to medical server using 3G communications. We introduced priority scheduling and data compression into the system to increase transmission rate of physiological critical signals which improve the bandwidth utilization. It also extends the life time of hand-held personal server by reducing power consumption during transmission.
Highlights
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with intelligent sensor nodes are becoming significant enabling technology for wide range applications
A wireless sensor network consists of many nodes equipped with a sensing unit, memory, microcontroller, wireless communication interface and power source constituting of a multi-hop network, where nodes in the same vicinity can communicate with each other with routing responsibilities
Using sensor nodes with communication technologies such as mobile phones i.e. PDA, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), 3G, and the internet, the sensor network can keep patient, caregivers, and doctor informed while establishing trends and detecting variations in health
Summary
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with intelligent sensor nodes are becoming significant enabling technology for wide range applications. Contrary to the traditional sensor networks that are carefully planned and deployed in the predetermined positions, WSNs can be deployed in an ad-hoc manner which make them robust, fault tolerance, and increase in spatial coverage They can greatly be used to monitor and track conditions of patients in both cities and rural areas using an intranet or internet thereby reducing the stress and strain of healthcare providers, eliminate medical errors, reduce workload and increase efficiency of hospital staff, reduce long-term cost of healthcare services, and improve the comfort of the patients [3]. Using sensor nodes with communication technologies such as mobile phones i.e. PDA, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), 3G, and the internet, the sensor network can keep patient, caregivers, and doctor informed while establishing trends and detecting variations in health When they are applied to biomedical applications they are often referred to as wireless biomedical sensor networks (WBSN) [6].
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