Wireless sensor network for health monitoring

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is becoming a significant enabling technology for a wide variety of applications. Recent advances in WSN have facilitated the realization of pervasive health monitoring for both homecare and hospital environments. Current technological advances in sensors, power-efficient integrated circuits, and wireless communication have allowed the development of miniature, lightweight, low-cost, and smart physiological sensor nodes. These nodes are capable of sensing, processing, and communicating one or more vital signs. Furthermore, they can be used in wireless personal area networks (WPANs) or wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) for health monitoring. Many studies were performed and/or are under way in order to develop flexible, reliable, secure, real-time, and power-efficient WBSNs suitable for healthcare applications. To efficiently control and monitor a patient’s status as well as to reduce the cost of power and maintenance, IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee, a communication standard for low-power wireless communication, is developed as a new efficient technology in health monitoring systems. The main contribution of this dissertation is to provide a modeling, analysis, and design framework for WSN health monitoring systems. This dissertation describes the applications of wireless sensor networks in the healthcare area and discusses the related issues and challenges. The main goal of this study is to evaluate the acceptance of the current wireless standard for enabling WSNs for healthcare monitoring in real environment. Its focus is on IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocols combined with hardware and software platforms. Especially, it focuses on Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance mechanism (CSMA/CA) algorithms for reliable communication in multiple accessing networks. The performance analysis metrics are established through measured data and mathematical analysis. This dissertation evaluates the network performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 unslotted CSMA/CA mechanism for different parameter settings through analytical modeling and simulation. For this protocol, a Markov chain model is used to derive the analytical expression of normalized packet transmission, reliability, channel access delay, and energy consumption. This model is used to describe the stochastic behavior of random access and deterministic behavior of IEEE 802.15.4 CSMA/CA. By using it, the different aspects of health monitoring can be analyzed. The sound transmission of heart beat with other smaller data packet transmission is studied. The obtained theoretical analysis and simulation results can be used to estimate and design the high performance health monitoring systems

Transmission Delay of Multi-hop Heterogeneous Networks for Medical Applications

Nowadays, with increase in ageing population, Health care market keeps growing. There is a need for monitoring of Health issues. Body Area Network consists of wireless sensors attached on or inside human body for monitoring vital Health related problems e.g, Electro Cardiogram (ECG), ElectroEncephalogram (EEG), ElectronyStagmography(ENG) etc. Data is recorded by sensors and is sent towards Health care center. Due to life threatening situations, timely sending of data is essential. For data to reach Health care center, there must be a proper way of sending data through reliable connection and with minimum delay. In this paper transmission delay of different paths, through which data is sent from sensor to Health care center over heterogeneous multi-hop wireless channel is analyzed. Data of medical related diseases is sent through three different paths. In all three paths, data from sensors first reaches ZigBee, which is the common link in all three paths. After ZigBee there are three available networks, through which data is sent. Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) are connected with ZigBee. Each network (WLAN, WiMAX, UMTS) is setup according to environmental conditions, suitability of device and availability of structure for that device. Data from these networks is sent to IP-Cloud, which is further connected to Health care center. Main aim of this paper is to calculate delay of each link in each path over multihop wireless channel.Comment: BioSPAN with 7th IEEE International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA 2012), Victoria, Canada, 201

A Multiple Model Based Approach for Deep Space Power System Fault Diagnosis

Improving protection and health management capabilities onboard the electrical power system (EPS) for spacecraft is essential for ensuring safe and reliable conditions for deep space human exploration. Electrical protection and control technologies on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) current human space platform relies heavily on ground support to monitor and diagnose power systems and failures. As communication bandwidth diminishes for deep space applications, a transformation in system monitoring and control becomes necessary to maintain high reliability of electric power service. This paper presents a novel approach for on-line power system security monitoring for autonomous deep space spacecraft

A Study on Bandwidth-Aware Routing Protocol based on SIC

Wireless Sensor Networks has a greater advantage in today‘s communication application such as environmental, traffic, military, health monitoring. In such smart environments, people with smart devices (nodes) can freely self-organize and form self-configuring ad-hoc network to send and forward data packets to a destination over multiple hops via intermediate nodes. To achieve these applications it is necessary to have a reliable routing protocol. The main motivation of this paper is to review various routing schemes in ad-hoc network that have recently been proposed to enhance throughput when transmitting and receiving packets during active communication. The review also focuses on the design of SIC routing protocol aiming at achieving high overall throughput compared to that of the hop count routing. In addition, the performance evaluation metrics are also discussed

A Priority-based Fair Queuing (PFQ) Model for Wireless Healthcare System

Healthcare is a very active research area, primarily due to the increase in the elderly population that leads to increasing number of emergency situations that require urgent actions. In recent years some of wireless networked medical devices were equipped with different sensors to measure and report on vital signs of patient remotely. The most important sensors are Heart Beat Rate (ECG), Pressure and Glucose sensors. However, the strict requirements and real-time nature of medical applications dictate the extreme importance and need for appropriate Quality of Service (QoS), fast and accurate delivery of a patient’s measurements in reliable e-Health ecosystem. As the elderly age and older adult population is increasing (65 years and above) due to the advancement in medicine and medical care in the last two decades; high QoS and reliable e-health ecosystem has become a major challenge in Healthcare especially for patients who require continuous monitoring and attention. Nevertheless, predictions have indicated that elderly population will be approximately 2 billion in developing countries by 2050 where availability of medical staff shall be unable to cope with this growth and emergency cases that need immediate intervention. On the other side, limitations in communication networks capacity, congestions and the humongous increase of devices, applications and IOT using the available communication networks add extra layer of challenges on E-health ecosystem such as time constraints, quality of measurements and signals reaching healthcare centres. Hence this research has tackled the delay and jitter parameters in E-health M2M wireless communication and succeeded in reducing them in comparison to current available models. The novelty of this research has succeeded in developing a new Priority Queuing model ‘’Priority Based-Fair Queuing’’ (PFQ) where a new priority level and concept of ‘’Patient’s Health Record’’ (PHR) has been developed and integrated with the Priority Parameters (PP) values of each sensor to add a second level of priority. The results and data analysis performed on the PFQ model under different scenarios simulating real M2M E-health environment have revealed that the PFQ has outperformed the results obtained from simulating the widely used current models such as First in First Out (FIFO) and Weight Fair Queuing (WFQ). PFQ model has improved transmission of ECG sensor data by decreasing delay and jitter in emergency cases by 83.32% and 75.88% respectively in comparison to FIFO and 46.65% and 60.13% with respect to WFQ model. Similarly, in pressure sensor the improvements were 82.41% and 71.5% and 68.43% and 73.36% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. Data transmission were also improved in the Glucose sensor by 80.85% and 64.7% and 92.1% and 83.17% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. However, non-emergency cases data transmission using PFQ model was negatively impacted and scored higher rates than FIFO and WFQ since PFQ tends to give higher priority to emergency cases. Thus, a derivative from the PFQ model has been developed to create a new version namely “Priority Based-Fair Queuing-Tolerated Delay” (PFQ-TD) to balance the data transmission between emergency and non-emergency cases where tolerated delay in emergency cases has been considered. PFQ-TD has succeeded in balancing fairly this issue and reducing the total average delay and jitter of emergency and non-emergency cases in all sensors and keep them within the acceptable allowable standards. PFQ-TD has improved the overall average delay and jitter in emergency and non-emergency cases among all sensors by 41% and 84% respectively in comparison to PFQ model

A Review of Wireless Body Area Networks for Medical Applications

Recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, integrated circuits, and wireless communication have allowed the realization of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBANs promise unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring for a long period of time and provide real-time updates of the patient's status to the physician. They are widely used for ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, and military applications. This paper reviews the key aspects of WBANs for numerous applications. We present a WBAN infrastructure that provides solutions to on-demand, emergency, and normal traffic. We further discuss in-body antenna design and low-power MAC protocol for WBAN. In addition, we briefly outline some of the WBAN applications with examples. Our discussion realizes a need for new power-efficient solutions towards in-body and on-body sensor networks.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, and 3 tables. In V3, the manuscript is converted to LaTe

A Novel Framework for Software Defined Wireless Body Area Network

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has gained huge popularity in replacing traditional network by offering flexible and dynamic network management. It has drawn significant attention of the researchers from both academia and industries. Particularly, incorporating SDN in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications indicates promising benefits in terms of dealing with challenges like traffic management, authentication, energy efficiency etc. while enhancing administrative control. This paper presents a novel framework for Software Defined WBAN (SDWBAN), which brings the concept of SDN technology into WBAN applications. By decoupling the control plane from data plane and having more programmatic control would assist to overcome the current lacking and challenges of WBAN. Therefore, we provide a conceptual framework for SDWBAN with packet flow model and a future direction of research pertaining to SDWBAN.Comment: Presented on 8th International Conference on Intelligent Systems, Modelling and Simulatio