Home healthcare via wireless biomedical sensor network

Abstract

Fast information retrieval is pivot of medical breakthrough to provide quality medical services. There were a number of attempts to develop clinical information system (CIS) which is reliable, affordable and accessible over the entire hospital and beyond. Today's home healthcare progression is becoming a predominant form of healthcare delivery. Although there have been many recent advances in biomedical sensors, low-power radio communication and embedded computation, there does not yet exist a flexible, robust communication infrastructure to integrate these devices into an emergency care setting. An efficient wireless communication substrate for medical devices that addresses ad hoc or fixed network formation, naming and discovery, security and authentication, as well as filtration and aggregation of vital sign data need to be studied. The potential applications will save lives, create valuable data for medical research, and cut the cost of medical services. In this paper, we focus on home healthcare via wireless sensor network (WSN) platform. WSN composed of a large number of sensor nodes and multi-hop networking capability that are densely deployed for a wide variety of applicants such as smart buildings, interactive user interfaces, environment control and highly suitable for monitoring in military and biomedical applications. We describe our experiences in developing and implement both hardware and software platform for medical sensor network, provides protocol for device discovery and multi-hop routing, as well as a simple query interface that is tailored for medical monitoring.