Abstract
People worldwide are getting older and this fact has pushed the need for designing new, more pervasive, and possibly cost effective healthcare systems. In this field, distributed and networked embedded systems, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), are the most appealing technology to achieve continuous monitoring of aged people for their own safety, without affecting their daily activities. This paper proposes recent advancements in this field by introducing WSN4QoL, a Marie Curie project which involves academic and industrial partners from three EU countries. The project aims to propose new WSN-based technologies to meet the specific requirements of pervasive healthcare applications. In particular, in this paper, the system architecture is presented to cope with the challenges imposed by the specific application scenario. This includes a network coding (NC) mechanism and a distributed localization solution that have been implemented on WSN testbeds to achieve efficiency in the communications and to enable indoor people tracking. Preliminary results in a real environment show good system performance that meet our expectations.
Highlights
Medical experts agree on the projections that forecast in the couple of decades the population aged over 65 years to increase from 6.9% to 12.0% worldwide and, in particular, from 15.5% to 24.3% in Europe [1], with an average worldwide life-span expected to extend another 10 years by 2050 [2]
Compared to the classical relay scenario where node C forwards the received packets in two distinct slots, the network coding (NC) scheme allows for achieving better performance in terms of joint packet loss ratio (PLR) and data goodput
While source 2 nodes of both testbeds were kept in a fixed position, source 1 nodes of both networks were carried by a person who was walking at approximately constant speed over a preplanned closed path crossing the rooms of the apartment, resulting in a time of a lap of around 5 minutes and repeating the path at least 10 times for each experiment
Summary
Medical experts agree on the projections that forecast in the couple of decades the population aged over 65 years to increase from 6.9% to 12.0% worldwide and, in particular, from 15.5% to 24.3% in Europe [1], with an average worldwide life-span expected to extend another 10 years by 2050 [2]. By 2050 healthcare spending is expected to double, claiming 20%–30% of gross domestic product (GDP) for some economies and 20% by 2015 In this context, new technologies that can help seniors live at home longer provide a “win-win” effect, both improving quality of life and potentially saving enormous amounts of money. It is natural to expect that consumers will embrace in-home technologies precisely because they can potentially save them money on the cost of unnecessary time-consuming doctor visits, not jeopardizing their daily life activities On this subject, this paper aims to present the WSN4QoL project [6], which involves the design of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) suited to meet healthcare application requirements.
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