Integration of wireless Fieldbus and wired Fieldbus for health monitoring

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have recently been proposed for a large range of applications in home and industrial automation, and for health and environment monitoring. Especially the ZigBee standard is getting rising attention as it can be used to implement wireless sensor networks, because of its low data rate and low power consumption. Increasingly there is a need to access wireless sensor network from other IP-based networks and also there is a need to add the wireless sensor functionalities to existing industrial Ethernet networks (field buses, Profibus, Profinet). In this paper we introduce how to combine a wireless Fieldbus to an existing wired Fieldbus by presenting an example for health monitoring of elderly people in an automated home environment.