When Internet of Things Meets e-Health: An Indoor Temperature Monitoring and Control Approach

Abstract

Ambient temperature is closely related to human health. Maintaining a comfortable and stable temperature is crucial for the treatment, rehabilitation and daily e-health care of patients, where the Internet of Things has been widely applied for this purpose. However, the existing research always separates the network design from temperature monitoring and control. In order to provide better e-health services, we design a solution to minimize the cost of energy consumption and delay. This work discusses a cyber-physical design for an indoor temperature monitoring system using a wireless sensor network. All sensors dynamically adjust the sleep/wake duty cycles and select the optimal anycast routing according to the sensed temperature. In addition, IoT-enabled heating, ventilation, and air conditioner (HVAC) systems for indoor temperature control have attracted unprecedented attention. HVAC can be connected to the Internet for weather and time-varying electricity price data. This work discusses the problem of minimizing the total energy cost of the HVAC system while keeping the indoor temperature within a prefixed range. The key idea is to leverage the time-varying electricity prices and do precooling/preheating using HVAC. The simulation results show that our temperature monitoring and control algorithm outperforms other heuristic schemes.