Wireless Sensor Networks and Their Applications to the Healthcare and Precision Agriculture

Abstract

Wireless connection based smart sensors network can combine sensing, computation, and communication into a single, small device. Because sensor carries its own wireless data transceiver, the time and the cost for construction, maintenance, the size and weight of whole system have been reduced. Information collected from these sensor nodes is routed to a sink node via different types of wireless communication approaches. Healthcare systems have restricted the activity area of patients to be within the medical health care center or residence area. To provide more a feasible situation for patients, it is necessary to embed wireless communication technology into healthcare systems. The physiological signals are then immediately transmitted to a remote management center for analysis using wireless local area network. Healthcare service has been further extended to become mobile care service due to the ubiquity of global systems for mobile communications and general packet radio service. It is important that using sensors to detect field-environment signals in agriculture is understood since a long time ago. Precision agriculture is a technique of management of large fields in order to consider the spatial and temporal variability. To use more sophisticated sensor devices with capabilities of chemical and biological sensing not only aids the personnel in the field maintenance procedure but also significantly increases the quality of the agricultural product. In this chapter, we examine the fields in healthcare and precision agriculture based on wireless sensor networks. In the application of healthcare systems, a System on a Chip (SoC) platform and Bluetooth wireless network technologies were combined to construct a wireless network physiological signal monitoring system. In the application of precision agriculture, an SoC platform was also used combining the ZigBee technology to consist a field signals monitoring system. In addition to the two applications, the fault tolerance in wireless sensor networks is also discussed in this chapter.